ART
AMERICA'S contribution to the visual arts of the past quarter-century has surely been that of movement. What Disney has done in two dimensions (and I speak, not of the quality of his line, the vulgarity of which is matched only by that of his sentiment, but of his sheer power to create movement in depth within the picture frame), Alexander Calder has done in three. His mobiles are entirely original, with all the roughness, the delicate, sensitive clumsiness' of originality, of a vein not yet completely worked. Calder cuts his metal plates, leaves and discs, for example, without any idea of their final disposition. They are piked from stock, to be related by their wire articulation one to another; according to the fancy of the moment. It is not hard to see that one of Calder's successors, if he constructs each weight for its specific part in the whole, may well produce a result that is even prettier and, mort captivating. I can
think of no movement, however, at which Calder has not hinted. The Lefevre Gallery, where he has been holding his first exhibition in this country for thirteen years, is filled for a few more days with the evanescent forms traced out by his abstract toys—inventive fantasies that pulse and dance, nod and sway, waddle, flutter, twist and breathe. It is a world of slow involutionS and permutations that is almost hypnotic.
* * * *
The " Young Contemporaries "—this year from thirty-seven art-schools all over the country—have once again been given welcome houseroom by the R.B.A: at their Suffolk Street Galleries. Fewer works are shown, but the general standard is probably higher than last year, and some of the adventurous spirit of the first of
these shows has returned. Several hands are by now familiar ; sculpture is meagre ; drawings and prints dull. Let us take the remarks about undue influence, English precocity, and premature judgements as written and read. On present showing Norman Adams, Donald Hamilton Fraser (too clever, and often too whimsy- sweet, by half), Richard Platt, Alfred Daniels, George Tuckwell, Peter Kinley, Gordon Tattersfield, Breon O'Casey, Yvonneka Jones, Elvet Wilson Thomas, Heather Homewood, Peter Coker, Sarah Baldwin, Peter Midgley, Michael Hare, Austin Davies, Valerie Gage, William Freeth stood out sufficiently in their differing idioms to rate a mark of one sort or another in my catalogue.
M. H. MIDDLETON.
Previous page
