King size
ART PAUL GRINKE
After the chaos of the last Venice Biennale, where the British Pavilion with its splendid two- horse team of Riley and King provided a wel- come oasis of calm, it is good to see a major exhibition of Phillip King's sculpture on home ground. Even the ample resources of the White- chapel Gallery have been taxed to accommodate the twelve large pieces which comprise the show, and one's first impression on entering is of a forest of coloured cones, slabs, girders and staircases like the tumbled ruins of some mega- lithic futuristic city. In an ideal world King's sculpture would find a natural setting like the Sphinx or the Pyramids but, within a tube ride from central London, the Whitechapel is the best one can hope for.
Only two major pieces have been omitted, 'Genghis Khan' and 'Nile,' both of which have been exhibited many times and are represented stylistically by other pieces in the same vein. Otherwise one can follow the development of King's imagination from the early watershed piece 'Declaration' of 1961, an uncompromis- ing statement of intent which rejected all the associations of pedestal sculpture, right up to the recent large groups of elements called 'Span' and 'Call.' In between King has explored the sculptural possibilities of cones in a whole series of richly inventive exercises. The earliest of the cone sculptures, 'Rosebud' (1962), was the first indication that a major new sculptor had ap- peared on the scene. As its name implies it was a gentle assertion of a new-found authority, in a somewhat cryptic polychrome form but with a very definite internal rhythm. The later cones, of which 'Through' is probably the most suc- cessful and compelling, have extended the pos- sibilities of this shape in both colour and the arrangement of its component parts. In some of the more lyrical pieces, such as 'Genghis Khan' and 'Twilight,' King has extended the cone into an umbrella-like fretwork fan which gives a decidedly romantic feel to what is essentially a prosaic geometric shape.
Later pieces constitute carefully thought-out; dialogues between identical elements, distin- guished by their colour and their relationship to each other. The basic element King employs is a hinged metal rectangle clustered in protective groups, the separate parts leaning one against another or swaying together to one side like a row of charlestoning chorus-girls. The most .ie-Fent sculptures are more complex arrange- .}ements which the spectator can walk through and round, but they are still united by an
identity of colour and form. 'Blue Blaze,' a disparate collection of broken staircases and blocks, tilted and slanted by some seismic shock,
is infused with a rich luminous powdery blue. 'Span' is an even more architectural group, in
navy-blue steel, flanked by broad-based pillars but with a definite unity which even the capri- cious behaviour of some of the elements cannot disrupt. The most ambitious example of this group, and perhaps the most successful, is 'Call,' a simple dialogue between two slim pillars of orange and green and two chunky groupings of rectangles in shades of the same colours.
Phillip King has rapidly proved himself the most capable miner of that rich quarry of dis- sociative floor-bound coloured sculpture which Antony Caro first unearthed. He works slowly and thoughtfully but intuitively, opening up and exploring each aspect of a work as it reveals itself to him; even the most cursory examina- tion of his work over the next few years should be amply rewarded.
At ,the Marlborough Gallery two small but choice shows reflect the major exhibition de- voted to the Bauhaus at Burlington House.
Lyonel Feininger and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy were both closely involved with the Bauhaus although their work was vastly different.
Moholy-Nagy was quick to realise the impor- tance of the new Russian artists, El Lissitzky and Malevich, at the close of the First World War and began to work on similar lines, calling his paintings Constrtictivism. He became Walter Gropius's right-hand man in the organisation of the Bauhaus and continued to advocate its principles in paintings, design and photo- graphy in both London and New York after the closure of the school under nazi pressure. He had a restlessly theoretical and inventive mind, capable of expressing the new -technology of industrial Europe and its discarded urban debris in terms of simple diagrammatic paint- ings, ordering space through a new kind of linear geometry. His photography, rarely seen outside the covers of the three books he produced in England, shows him to have been almost as good as Cartier-Bresson.
Feininger, on the other hand, was a romantic, a landscape watercolourist who visualised
scenes in an abstract schema of lines. His delicate little watercolours have some of the simplicity of Klee with the same careful
economy of line and colour. Most appealing of all is the wooden toy village he made in the early 1950s, a delightful fantasy straight out of the Wizard of Oz and just large enough to fit snugly under a mushroom.
At the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank is a curious trilogy of artists. The splendidly comprehensive collection of Nolde water- colours from the Nolde Foundation in Seebull, recently shown at Edinburgh, is flanked on the ground floor by two exhibitions of recent works by William Turnbull and John Walker. Turn- bull is primarily a sculptor and these Paintings, large unbroken fields of pure colour, have little to say that has not been stated far more suc- cessfully in his sculpture. John Walker shows a group of shaped canvasses in sombre colours incorporating smaller parallelograms which do little to redeem what seem to me to be very uneventful paintings. Nolde needs little intro- duction, though the tragic isolation of much of his lik and work can only be realised in the presence of such a large group of the 'ungemalte Bilder: the 'unpainted pictures' Nolde made when the nazis finally forbade him to practise his art. It is probably the most revealing and enjoyable exhibition in London at pfesent.
Previous page
