Old Ways in Gravure
ANY Picasso exhibition these days, such as, the magnificent show of his graphic work at the Arts Council, is bound to look to some eyes a little old-fashioned, for the values his work asserts have not much to do with the most avant-garde attitudes. He does not regard the painter—or the sculptor—as someone who should, in the mid-twentieth century, devote himself simply to modulating the spaces and surfaces of architecture. He is not, like the action painters, simply concerned to present a graph of his response to the procedure of applying paint to canvas. He does not accord with any 'realist' esthetic which is not at the same time so inclusive as to be meaningless. Whatever may be posterity's varying estimate of his quality and significance, he remains the outstanding contemporary example of the pictorial artist, within the traditional implica- tions of the word. He does not need to limit the extent of the painter's universe in order that the plot of ground on which he himself stands should not look too small. He does not demand, in fact, that the spectator should limit his response, bring only a part of him- self into contact with the images be creates. We can bring to his work the whole range of our visual, emotional, intellectual experiences and find them insufficient, probably; certainly have them enlarged and deepened, enriched and renewed. He has something to say about the face and figure as a structure or a vehicle
of the emotions; we can understand the bestiality of war or the character of a cray- fish or discover an oblique of mediasval chivalry. He is astonishingly a universal artist in a time of manic and self-satisfied specialisa- tion. of this generosity and lack of superstition, for his use of all these media has been singularly direct and unassuming. He has been the master in them and has never been afflicted by an exaggerated subjection of truth to materials. He has understood what these media can most naturally and happily achieve and yet it has always been the pictorial idea which has remained dominant; these ideas have always been so potent or at least so alive that he has not needed to indulge in any cunning or devious exploitation of the materials' extreme possibilities. Connoisseurs of watercolour or limited practitioners in this medium have wasted hundreds of words in praise of it or in an attempt to define its essence. And yet it was Cezanne, no Old English Watercolourist, who used the stuff to its greatest effect. A book like Hayter's New Ways in Gravure, with its absorption in matters of technical inventive- ness and 'new' ingenuity, is made to look irrelevant in face of the prints in this exhibi- tion; and the collection of prints in the recent American show, with all their dexterity and picturesque devices, cannot be recalled with much satisfaction.
It is not to be altogether inconsequent to mention in this context the exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum of the stained glass windows destined for Coventry Cathe- dral, for here again a restrictive medium has been used with directness and intensity. I hope to return to this exciting event before the show closes on September 30. BASIL TAYLOR
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