Arts
Drawing contemporary fire
Terence Maloon
The Contemporary Art Society has been an intrepid pressure-group as well as a major benefactor to living artists since it was founded in 1910. It was conceived in the Bloomsbury drawing-room of Sir Philip and Lady Ottoline Morrell. Allied to francophile aesthetes like Roger Fry and Clive Bell, the Morrells enlisted several of the well-heeled itinerants to Bohemia in their acquaintance, resolving to improve the situation for modern artists in Britain as best they could.
In 1910 the Tate Gallery administrators were unenthusiastic about the experimental course painting and sculpture had assumed on the Continent — as they continued to be, to our great cost, for several decades afterwards. The Royal Academy was then the chief arbiter of taste for the Empire; Academicians were similarly antipathetic, rightly sensing in the relentless questionings of the modernists, a potent and ultimately devastating critique of their most fundamental assumptions.
The Contemporary Art Society celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1960 with a retrospective selection of its purchases and exhibited them at the Tate Gallery. Today the Tate houses the CAS's office. Last week, the CAS dismantled an exhibition of drawings mounted as part of the Silver Jubilee celebrations in the Royal Academy's Diploma Galleries. It's not that the CAS has changed its tune to gain the endorsement of its old enemies. Over the years the Society has delivered the most effective body-blows to those institutions, gradually bringing them into line with its own way of thinking.
In 1910 the forces of change were already well advanced in Paris, with the trail-blazers of modern art largely victorious. Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting was on show in major museums; Rodin was at the height of his fame; Cezanne had been accorded a major retrospective in 1907, and Picasso and Matisse were protected by wealthy and influential benefactors. In Britain Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Seurat, etc. were virtually unknown, and when their work was shown for the first time in Roger Fry's Post-Impressionist Exhibition, a few months after the CAS's foundation, their reception was one of contempt, ridicule and stupefaction. Even in artists' circles there was nothing comparable to the heated dis putes, the salutary energies and the audacious infringements of official paradigms then embroiling and bemusing Paris. Lady Ottoline mustered her subscribers and, guided by the acumen of Roger Fry, pre pared to thrust British artists, art institutions, collectors and the gallery-going public into the twentieth century. Since then, the Society has presented museums throughout Britain and the Commonwealth with over 3,000 works of art, many of them the first works by major artists to enter a national collection.
The CAS has not lessened its founders' concern and benevolence in regard to young artists. With the current economic recession, the disappearance of those adventurous collectors of the 1960s, the growing bureaucratisation of art-admiration bodies and the subtly demoralising effect wrought by their necessary reliance on state patronage, the situation facing young artists is bleak — and worsening. Similarly, yesterday's avant-garde critics have abrogated any responsibility as intercessors between artists and their public, declined to differentiate meritorious from half-cocked art, ceased to explain individual artists' rationales and now abstain even from describing their work. It's possible that in the near future the CAS will regain the strategic effectiveness it had in the 1910s. For a start, they offer an education programme that actually encourages looking at and reflecting upon works, a programme somewhat more informative and useful than the course in philistine hectoring currently offered by certain newspaper critics. Unlike the latter, the CAS has young artists' welfare at heart; they do their best to seek out talents hitherto unrecognised, to further their reputations and to encourage the interest of collectors.
The CAS encourages its members to collect, advising them on their purchases and indicating some of the more promising young artists for their consideration. It is a service they also extend to museums, to businesses and industry. Judging from their past record and from the evidence of the selection on show at the RA, their corn petence in these matters is open to little dispute. Every year the committee elects two of its representatives to purchase works according to their personal tastes. This procedure avoids the strife and compromise usual to committee dealings. Such laissezfaire may sometimes result in somewhat quirky or rather tame acquisitions; on other occasions the selectors may be highly discriminating and make some inspired choices. One of the risks in investing money in untried artists is that early promise often goes unsubstantiated; the artists lose their direction or their nerve fails.
Because some selectors have more exacting standards and keener insights into individual artists' relative strengths, it is sometimes the CAS's good fortune to secure certain artists' very best work when their achievement is at its grandest. They carried off a wonderfully inventive Bernard Cohen drawing (from his 'spaghetti-and-spot' period), an Alan Green essay in various media, uneasily reconciled as they yoke together jostling blocks (1973), a superbly tensed John Hoyland gouache of 1967, and two of Prunella Clough's best drawings from 1972. But for me the greatest surprise, the exhibit that did more than any other to dislodge my assumption of drawing's relative slightness and its essentially ancillary status, was Garth Evans's 'Drawing no. 2' (1974).
Evans is a sculptor whose work has often bored me in the past. His interests owe allegiance to systemic art as well as to the highly unsystematic masterpieces of Jackson Pollock. Evans's sculptures related to this drawing are low, rising no more than two feet off the ground. Their plan is rectangular, their constituent modules laid out according to a grid. Evans's materials are either aluminium or balsa wood, forming rigid or floppy networks over a patch of floor. The sum effect is unemphatic, nonhierarchical, and rather too cerebral, too anonymous for my taste. Here a similar scheme worked out as a relief on graph paper on a much reduced scale, hung vertically beneath a battery of overhead lights, is a magically beautiful thing to see. The raised strips of paper waver between the brightest white and the deepest shadoW, spilling a tangle of adventitious, immaterial lines across their supporting plane. The elements in relief entrap the light into the liveliest of surfaces. Random shadows of various emphasis swallow up the mathematic, a luminous enchantment overtaking any analysis. This is the kind of aesthetic density, the meeting of great simplicity with unfathomable mystery which usually constitutes a masterpiece. Why on earth Evans didn't follow it up beats me. The opportunity for seeing this and other superlative drawings by contemporary Brit' ish artists was open to Londoners until 30 October. The show's next port of call will be Huddersfield (from 12 November 10 December), and thence to Dundee, Kettering, Bradford, Southport, Eastbourne, Plymouth and Cheltenham.
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