Art
Pathfinders
John McEwen
(Nigel Greenwood Inc, 41 Sloane Stephen Cox, new sculpture Gardens, SW1)
Bill Woodrow, new sculpture (Lisson Gallery, 66-68 Bell Street, NW I) Wenceslaus Hollar, prints and drawings; and Italian Drawings from the Lugt Collection, Institute Neerlandais, Paris (British Museum)
Drawing in the Italian Renaissance Workshop
(Victoria and Albert Museum) There are a high road and a low road at the moment in the approaches of Younger British sculptors. High-roaders si,eeln to have had enough of modern flights irorn the norm and have returned to carving attld modelling and traditional subjects. w-roaders, mostly to be seen at the Lis son Gallery where they are being pro- moted as a new school, further take the starch out of art by using nothing but bits a°f junk . Two of the best exemplars of both Wttitudes currently have exhibitions of new 9rk• Stephen Cox (till 14 May) takes the ',"gb road, Bill Woodrow (till 7 May) the inw
Cox has never been embarrassed to ex-
13l first renaissance principles in his ore
sculpture, and two years ago he took the
ultimate step of going to Italy to work. This exhibition, entitled Fragments from a Grand Tour, Italy 1981-83, is the result: ' fragments' (some of the works literally are fragmented) from a `grand tour' certainly, because he undertook it in deliberately 18th-century style, working and looking his way through the country, armed with in- structive books. One of these was Vasari's practical guide to sculptural stones and techniques, and Cox set himself the task of making pieces in all the stones mentioned. Thus there is a tondo in peperino — a grey, sparkling, volcanic stone much used in Roman building before the popularity of travertine. There are two large frescoed pieces in broken slabs of travertine and a small study; a fragmented tondo in white calecata; one large tri-partite piece and two smaller ones in pink rosso di Verona; and a partially silver-glided tondo in slippery white carrara.
Cox used to present starkly geometrical plays on perspective, but there was always a flamboyant hint, which now finds its libera- tion. Italy has been good for him, bringing his taste for the sensual to the fore. `Ecstasies (St Agatha)', the largest of the rosso di Verona pieces, is the most ex- uberant: a stylish rendering of draped female desirability in three parts — head and shoulders, breasts and serpentine back; and a figure also appears in one of the more spatially illusionistic travertine pieces, in both of which views are 'painted' on with copper sulphate staining. Diversity strengthens the work. Smaller pieces in the form of simple motifs look no more than exercises in the antique. Overall, however, it is a welcome change to see beauty pur- sued so wholeheartedly.
Bill Woodrow cuts new forms out of old; most frequently, discarded car bonnets. The most ingenious feature of his method is that the new object is made without adding to or severing the original. Considering he makes things in the present show as elaborate as a sealion, a telephone and a dog, this is quite a feat. Most of the pieces suggest a moral — 'The Empty Spoon', for instance, makes a point about the wasteful- ness of modern man with the aid of a super- market trolley, a heap of old electric objects and their flexes, bunched at their ex- tremities to form a ball painted to represent the globe. Like some other of his ideas, this lapses into the obvious, but Woodrow's chief problem is what to do with his own left-overs. His method is only satisfactory if i the original object plays as crucial a part in the final artefact as the new one that has arisen from it — as when, in this selection, the side of a mop bucket is unwrapped on the ground to form a starfish-cum-pool-of- water. Of those taking part in the current vogue for recycling junk, Woodrow must nevertheless be said to remain the least gim- micky, the most truly sculptural in method and poetic.
A survey of the work of Wenceslaus Hollar and two devoted to Italian drawing are among the most notable art-historical offerings of the moment (all till 15 May). Born in Prague, Hollar lived most of his ar- tistic life in England or the pay of English patrons. He is probably best known for his panoramas of London, before and after the Great Fire, but this selection reveals that he was much more than a skilful scenographer. An extraordinary series of etchings on the subject of fur muffs alone assures him an artistic place.
Most pleasurable of the Italian exhibi- tions is the one at the V & A. Its purpose is didactic, but not to the point of spoiling the installation. Drawings by Filipinno Lippi, Signorelli and portraits in general are some of the most tempting items. The catalogue is a wonderful bargain at £4.95. The BM's exhibition is much larger (133 against 74), spanning the 15th to 18th centuries, and much more specialised. An abundance of minor schools and tentative attributions makes it a connoisseurs' picnic. As Delacroix and others have pointed out, the later masters may be more masterful but they lack the simplicity and sincerity of the earlier. Both exhibitions might be thought to have something to do with the quin- centenary of Raphael's birth, but the inclu- sion of only two authenticated fragments at the BM hardly suggests it. More obviously the BM's exhibition celebrates I the 180th birthday of James Byam Shaw, long associated with the museum, and the publication of his complete catalogue of the late Frits Lugt's Collection, from which this selection has been made.
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