ART
NEARLY all our " art," wrote Roger Fry, is made, bought and sold merely for its value as an indication of social 'status. Two new Festival exhibitions have cast a fiendish eye backwards over the past century to trace some of the changes in British taste since the Academies and the Industrial Revolution drove a wedge between " art " and " craft." At once depressing,' exhilarating, ludicrous, chastening and entirely fascinating, they complement each other 'perfectly. The one comprises work done by men and women all too conscious of the critic looking over their shoulder ; the other by craftsmen for the most part sensibly unaware of the critic.
" Ten Decades," presented by the Institute of Contemporary' Arts at the R.B.A. Galleries, is a review of painting and sculpture which attracted attention in its own day—unsieved by present critical fashions. The storerooms up and down the country have been ran- sacked, so that here one can find, presented chronologically, both Albert Moore and Henry Moore, Burne-Jones and David Jones, J. F. Lewis and Wyndham-Lewis, the Whistlers—James McNeill and Rex, Stanley Spencer and Spencer Stanhope, Augustus Egg and Francis Bacon. No one will begrudge the organisers—Messrs. Grigson, Ironside and Nicolson—the naughty relish with which they haVe achieved one or two juxtapositions and a sometimes acid choice of contemporary critical quotations in the catalogue (which, incidentally, is a capital piece of work).
To list the points at which the high art of " Ten Decades " over- laps the fantastic assemblage of popular and traditional art— irreverently titled " Black Eyes and Lemonade "—at the Whitechapel Art Gallery would take more than a column of this journal. Let Barraud's painting of His Master's Voice, which appears-in one form or another at both, serve as link between culture, commerce and British taste. At Whitechapel a certain insouciance may be detected in the air. (The organisers of the exhibition may be seen photo- graphed upon a rather rude model cow belonging to a seaside photographer, and Capt. L. John Silver appears among the lenders.) Here among mountains of,hric-i-brat may be found larger chef d'oeuvres like a lion's head constructed of 6,000 screws, a model 'of Dunstable priory church made of 3,8621 matchsticks vying with St. Paul's in icing sugar, an articulate advertising lemon, a fireplace in the form of an Airedale dog, an enormous lace curtain depicting the Battle of Britain and an extraordinary painting of Lord Kitchtmer
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