Art
Seeing stars
John McEwen
Eugene Atget: Photographs of Old France; Adrian Berg: recent watercolours; John Murphy: Beyond the fixing of appearances (Serpentine Gallery, till 25 March)
Four Rooms devised by Howard Hodgkin, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Richard Hamilton, Anthony Caro (Liberty, Regent Street, till 10 March; then on tour)
The Serpentine has a poetic programme of shows at the moment, its side galleries devoted to watercolour landscapes of the Lake District and pastels of star- scapes by John Murphy, with central pride of place being given to the now legendary photographs of the Frenchman Eugene Atget (1857-1927). Atget had an avant- garde following by the time he died — his prints were rescued from certain destruc- tion by the (today) famous American photographer Berenice Abbot (b. 1898) but it was not enough to save him from poverty or from being buried without a stone to mark his grave in the municipal cemetery at Bagneaux. Sixty years later, however, there are many who would argue his case as the greatest photographer of all and he has engendered an academic in- dustry. This is ironic, because he himself apparently had no artistic pretensions. He began by selling prints of architectural details to salon painters of genre scenes, The Spectator 3 March i9and when this market gave out in the 180 he continued as just one more of the pans 84 thousands of strolling photographers documenting, in his own words, 'coins toresques' . It is these 'coins most rural that form the subject of the Pre" pit toresques' sent survey, and not the more deserverilY famous images of Versailles that were to be seen a year or two back at the Heinz Gallery or the deserted streets and disregarded cor- ners of Paris that were hailed by the Or' realists as the urban symbol of And ,. modernt man's loneliness and alienation. Ana r.",, they add a gentle — and of course not at "" at their artless (witness the dawn starts so that tile world could be pictured empty of PI!, and modern trappings) — lament of the" own to his great dirge on Time and its Pass- ing. This is a hard poetic act to follow, 11 nicely offset by the selection of Berg a n Murphy. Berg is best known for his riotous,: ly coloured post-Bonnard views of Regent Park, but here he presents cool viat,,,er• colours in the form of narrow
yards wide and only inches high.
panorarri'; Col011,5 becomes secondary to space — Regetitts Park's flatness stretched across four shee e in emphasis; the long waters of Winderll'a and Grasmere painted sympatheticallY asd, meander of blue across a similar sPr„e,i3.te But colour, in the form of his favt)"-he pinks and reds, gets a look in withst ° f heathery Lake District, giving us the be both modes. The slippery 'oll might be said to be the central subject of way art evades definitt f John Murphy's more visually problemarieo series of pastel starscapes. The clue iS of their corporate title — Beyond the fiXinfieir appearances — which refers to t ty making as well as content. Their veive a surfaces can only be fixed physically t° certain degree and although each Picrn,(ew identically framed and of an identical sof and colour, each depicts a different aren,,te. the star-chart and each has a different ti`.r. tain point. Word and image a Therefore content too is fixed only w a `.„, relevance in Murphy's work but on this casion, with the exception of the Po'ica, he has chosen to introduce the star series, he
image is not strong enough
the lush titles (Passion of dark to stiP1.),„, infenova.te etc). As pictures they do not corninunicex, enough to grab the viewer, which M( co re of e(40eil'. plain the battering their unglazed stirla s to have already received from what aPPfartais be a disgruntled public. 'Shooting 5 and finger marks are not his doing. oil 'For the first time a major Arts CO exhibition opens in a London store% ro; claims the press release for Four Rtkin but as it turns out, only Howard 1-1°Trbe and Marc Chaimovicz supply the retail goods, and only Hodgkin applies torn.cri. b wholeheartedly to the business of desrare. His fabrics are not wildly original, his biaa wood tables artfully splotched with t` „ for may be a bit too close to gar Shadedet tas arid Liberty-goers, but his crisplY bronze supported table-lamps are bo th s elegant and practical — casting a sheer light for reading and being sturdily unbreakable and difficult to budge. Currently priced at £205 (small) and £275 (large), they will nevertheless surely prove market winners. Hodgkin is the only one of the four partici- pants to risk his fine-art neck in this applied-art way — Chaimovicz only half Hamilton so and Anthony Caro and Richard , while producing notable con- trIbutions, remaining firmly behind fine art barricades. This does not go against the Pen brief or even the idea of the original, st,olely, art gallery tour, but it does make uodgkin the star at Liberty.
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