Art
Third degree
Alistair Hicks
Over 2,500 students roll off the art school conveyor belt every year, yet throughout Britain there are only some hundred painters and sculptors who make a living solely from their work. One would naturally expect, therefore, fierce activity at the time of the degree shows with students pulling every trick to attract clients, dealers and publicity. After all, at this point they have every advantage in the marketplace, not having paid for their materials, their studio or indeed the wall space. Most self respecting artists of course don't think like this. The degree show to them is often the first time they can show off their art, be judged as artists. It is unfortunate for most of them that they are seen alongside the many other students of the art college: the industrial designer, the furniture maker, the jeweller and silver- smith — all of whom have very different Prospects and display a highly professional attitude.
The Royal College this year, as usual, Was a joy to visit; it had the sporadic life of a gipsy fair with the vital difference that its stalls were often centres of excellence. Textiles greeted the visitor at the door. The talent spotter might have walked on in his search for startling novelty, but there was no lack of good design. John Brink- low's Napoleonic armoire (a cupboard in the form of the Emperor and not a piece of empire furniture) immediately caught one's eye. Just across the way was proof that the Bloomsbury influence is far from dead. Though Cressida Bell must be sick of Comparisons with the Omega workshop, there was more than a whiff of the spirit behind that old democratic gesture, not unlY in her work but pervading right through the show. Since William Morris, the British have had a fixation with turning artists into designers. Early attempts like his own and the later Omega were doomed to failure, but a trip around the Royal College shows that their aims have been achieved beyond their wildest dreams. Alison Bradley rightly won the Garrard award; her gold pieces possess the move- ment of cloth. The furniture crop is equally Impressive. Clare Jones presented a sofa cum bed; its upholstery on a light metal framework slots into a low wooden base in many ways, one of which has the seat backs on opposite sides to induce extra intimacy and a push-me-pull-you effect. Martin Woolner produced a strikingly modern desk unit using a cylinder, cuboid and pyramid. In the Ceramics and Glass De- partment Rachel Woodman continues the high standard set by Brian Blanthorn and Anne Smyth last year. However, once out of Kensington Gore and into the sculpture schools the story is very different. There isn't even a hint of the excitement that other young British sculptors have gener- ated in the last few years.
The Royal College refuse to release figures on the budgets of their respective departments. We know that the mean average cost per student in 1982 was £6,000 per year and that the painting and sculp- ture schools helped to keep this so low. The College were only too happy to announce that every graduate in their Industrial Design Department received jobs as soon as they left, but obviously the Pro-Rector is embarrassed by how little is being spent on painters and sculptors. The problem runs deeper still. Is the State obtaining any return on the little we are spending?
Society has laid the burdens of art education on the art schools and is surprised when they cannot succeed in creating great artists in three years. Raphael was training as a painter before he was orphaned at the age of 11, but it wasn't until he was 21 that he produced such masterpieces as the `Marriage of the Virgin' and even that was close in style to Perugino. Art schools today feel they have to teach the artistic grammar. They only get hold of their pupils at 18 at the earliest. Bearing this in mind it is a miracle anything worthwhile materialises for the degree shows. The true and interesting test must always come a few years after the artist has left school. First, is he or she still painting? Then, has he emerged as an artist in his own right? And, finally, is he any good?
Having set the stage to hedge my bets, I have to admit that I cannot resist a gamble myself. Considering what is happening in the field of sculpture, the work at the shows so far has been disappointing. The Royal Academy Schools provided the ex- ception with one outstanding carver. Harry Brockway could be accused of being too strongly influenced by Eric Gill, but there are also elements in his work of this century's great artists — Picasso and Ma- tisse and their interest in tribal art. His post-graduate offering may not show him as a technical or conceptual revolutionary, but it does reveal that he has the ability to assimilate ideas whilst maintaining his own powerful identity. More than anything else it proclaims him as a carver of sensational skill both in stone and wood.
There are three painters I'd like to mention. Nicholas Fredman, at 28, is old enough to have escaped the blood-sucking approach of Coldstream and Uglow at the Slade and has created some disturbing Crowleyesque imagery. Allen Ball at Cam- berwell has developed an updated St Ives simplicity on wood salvaged from a skip. However it is Alison Cross, also at Cam- berwell, who best illustrates the dilemma of the art school. Last year she started working on a large scale. Her first major canvas shocks one with its apparent matur- ity. Though one lower section of the painting is clumsily composed, there is a consistency in her vision. In the following year she has experimented more with other people's visions. This may prove an impor- tant learning process for her, but the work is certainly not the kind that should be shown at her first public exhibition.
With art training before art college virtually non-existent, the college has to instruct the basics. The pressures and demands of time, however, often mean they don't even do this. They are caught trying to cram into three years the indoc- trination to which any civilised community would devote 23. Our worst crime is to come. Having given our young artists the privilege of this education, we completely abandon them. As Brian Sewell discovered recently: 'Bill Benson is on the wrong side of the cheese counter at Harrods, Mike Hargreaves drives a train on the London Underground, John Whiting is a market gardener in Hampshire, and Peter Lums- den is a shop-fitter. Martin Black paints houses (outside, and up a ladder, not inside tromping an oeil with gin and tonic),
and in a home for delinquent children in Hackney, Phil Bradley plumbs, mends fences, and odd-jobs his days away to the accompaniment of mind-obliterating reg- gae; Simon Davis has gone amiably dotty and talks curly kale into burgeoning on the high west coast of Scotland. Tony Lums- den teaches art in a South London school all day and every day, and returns to nightly domesticity drained of all energy and impulse. Only he could be said to be in any way a fruitful return on the State's investment in his education, for they were all painters, trained either at the Royal Academy or the Royal College; all in their final year, exhibited work that showed remarkable strength and promise, and all have sunk without trace.'
There is nothing to stop the same hap- pening to the Class of '84. It is time we lived up to the responsibility of having artists amongst us.
Alistair Hicks is the editor of Mercury.
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