Art
Three Generations
By NEVILE WALLIS
THE recent debut of a 'Pop. painter on the professional stage has set my fancy devising a scene involving four -artists. The two youngest, Patrick and David, are celebrating their first successful shows of 'new figurative' paintings, Patrick uneasily debating how his equipment can merit the frantic ballyhoo. Once a Rome scholar himself and now approaching forty, the saturnine Henry believes that 011 his crucial exhibition depends the break-through tu highest recognition or the sign of a reputation's declining curve. Julius, the veteran, speaks last; Celebrity, he tells them, evades the suitor and favours most a single-minded independent who has pursued his private idiom in seclusion for perhaps thirty years before finding himself preposterously feted as a forerunner of an inter• national vogue. Invented as this. situation is, there is some divination in the reflections I have attributed to Patrick Procktor (Redfern) and David Oxtoby (Gallery One), to the problematic Henry Inlander, (Leicester) and a latecomer to international repute, Julius Bissier at Gimpel's. Mr. Procktor is a Slade School prodigy who has leapt into the arena with an armoury effective enough' Combining various elements, principally the enigmatic devices of Bacon with Vaughan'! rudimentary male, he handles his partitioned compositions with confidence, vigour and a relish for juicy pigment. No one would grudge the huzzas which have greeted this knowing consolidation of recent advances in an up-to-date idiom undeniably more substantial and spectacle Jar than the run of new figuration. Yet a certain slickness about Procktor's bright illusory figures in their spatial frameworks seems to militate against any very intensive exploration through trial and error, any daring to go out on a limb' which such painting may simulate. His Red Army Ensemble is the sort of fantasy which 01 more deliberative colleague Michael Andr might have tackled. Only Andrews might halle produced a desperately ambitious (and menl°fnl' t able) failure, whereas the ingenious newco makes no mistake at all. And that, in a Idng' term view, is hardly auspicious.
David Oxtoby has less pretensions. His
imagery, mixed up with jazz and horror Oil':is deployed in a derisively ghoulish spirit in 1137 bright decorations. Anything may emerge out his style of the maddest motley from a ribbod510' brindled cat to the abstract notion of a negr;s band in full blast. The cut of the motley ' distinctive enough and worn with an air.
Henry Inlander is a much tougher proble.'; His more ambitious new paintings reflect nler feeling for the great spaces of America togeth
with a mystical symbolism. Now an artist's very technique being part and parcel of the message he seeks to convey, it is usually unwise to attempt 10 dissociate the 'message' from the character of its expression. But these paintings are not purely abstract. Inlander seeks indeed to convey through arcane symbols, enclosed in a divided screen Poised in space, his meditations on the angel descending in the Book of Revelations and his experience of an eclipse. Sensitive as his handling always is, his imagery wants the power to bear the burden of associations entrusted to it. Only in the second of his versions of the Revelation, where diaphanous areas are contrasted with delicately scumbled blocks, does the airy struc- ture so take wing that its literary implications appear irrelevant. I suspect these introspective excursions represent a transitional phase in this explorer's art.
Anyone who has an eye for Klee must yield to the gentler, tentative spell of Julius Bissier. A shade more elaborate than we have seen previ- ously at Gimpel's, his pictorial script is to the German miniaturist as legible as a poem. His limpid or mottled aquarelles are as precious as the Chinese.
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