Art
Design at Work
By NEVILE WALLIS
ONCE again the Royal College of Art has mounted with style an exuberant and unpredict- able exhibition in its Gulben- kian Hall, itself an adven- turous piece of architecture alongside the Albert Hall. Here, until May 11, prints, posters, illustrations, paper- back covers, film and television experiments show what has flowed from past and present students at the School of Graphic Design. Their functional inventiveness permeates other depart- ments of the College and the industrial world outside. Those elastically sidling abstract sym- bols announcing TV's Wednesday Magazine, the animated school-desk titling of Top of the Form, the layouts of The Economist, Daily Express and Sunday Times colour supplement owe their devising to Professor Richard Guyatt's graphic- design course. Professional innovation springs from the three years' discipline.
I dropped in for a College film projected at the exhibition, written, produced and directed by short-course students for ABC's Tempo pro- gramme. This evocation, in The Medium-sized Cage, of the atmosphere of an art-student's digs leans on Wellsian symbolism. Jack Robinson is just another maundering, self-questioning stu- dent shifting his rooms to the accompaniment of juke-box bursts and 'thinks' monologue. His reflection on the artist's changing values rings wryly true. It's no longer to the world that you want' to prove you're a genius, but to yourself —and that's a damn sight harder.' But the im- portant point is that the visual images could only have been composed by an artistic de- signer impressionable to 'pop' art and other manifestations in this Kensington Bauhaus. There is a brilliant moment, for example, when the camera fastens obsessionally on a photo on the artist's screen of inconsequential pin-ups, which jerks into a live girl twisting.
The penetration of such lively creative talent into fields of publicity and promotion—television is already feeling the stimulus of Royal College directors and lighting cameramen—makes of the art critic himself a new frontiersman. He finds more purposeful invention in the set designs of TWTWTW than in a gallery. He discovers the current juggling with image and reality ex- ploited most ingeniously in Alan Fletcher's streamer on a bus where the visible heads of top-deck passengers become incongruously united with the hosiery advertised beneath. Such processed, topical art is accepted by the man-in- the-street oblivious of the new techniques whose evolution is shown here with instructive wit.
Design is also the essence of Ben Nicholson's surface painting and shallow reliefs. His cele- bration, both at Gimpel's, illustrating his varia- tions of style since 1925, and at the New London Gallery with his recent works from Switzerland, leads one to doubt if future history can possibly accord Nicholson so high a place as he at present occupies. He is our only regional painter who is a consistent international champion. How he achieved this is shown in Gimpel's excellent ex- amples of his progress from early clear-cut landscapes and his allusions to Braque, through the serene white reliefs up to 1961.
The very limitations of Nicholson's systematic ultra-refined sensibility expressed in geometric precision, in delicately grained tinted surfaces, cool Cornish light and overlapping profiles, establish stability in a chaotic age. In political terms, the Webbs gained similar prestige as ascetic high priests above the Fabian ferment. The move to the Ticino has not sensibly affected the balance of the artist's reliefs, his bleached colours with some carefully placed brighter accent, or the wiry line defining jugs and tilting architecture. The New London Gallery, more admirable in its effective ways of presenting top-flight artists than in the manner of excluding harsher notices from its cuttings book, is unlikely to be dismayed by reactions to this spiritually detergent and unruffled achievement.
Charles Howard, the elderly, withdrawn American painter working here, appears at McRoberts and Tunnard's. His elaborate, some- times over-elaborated, constructions in black and white with sparing low tones of colour are "a gradually acquired taste. It is acquired only if one recognises the single-minded conviction with which Howard imparts a surrealist unease and tension to these quasi-geometric planes and whiskery lines. Personal amalgams of Miro and Calder's pendants with a dash of Beardsley's 'preciousness, they touch one only in so far as they sincerely investigate the mystery latent in such complex contrivances.
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