The tradition of intensity
Frances Spalding
A PARTIAL TESTAMENT: ESSAYS ON SOME MODERNS IN THE GREAT TRADITION by Helen Lessore
Tate Gallery, £11.95
Rumour has it that when Helen Les- sore ran the Beaux Arts Gallery she slept in a bed in the centre of its bare space, waking each morning to reinterrogate the exhibition on display. Famous for her ruthless artistic integrity, she ran the gal- lery from 1951 to 1965 and showed, among others, Auerbach, Bacon, Kossoff and Michael Andrews, artists now regarded as pre-eminent but then little known. The gallery was peculiarly attuned to the mood of the post-war period. John Bratby, one of its artists, recently recalled: 'It was a dry and unhappy place, concerned not with the joy of life . . . but with the misery of the soul, Angst, the human predicament, man's condition, ugliness and truth . . . You could not show pictures of pretty flowers or pin-up girls there.' Nor are any to be found here, in this book of essays on 11 artists, none of them lightweight or remotely concerned with Pop Art, and all related, Lessore argues, to the Great Tradition.
The Great Tradition? The term startles because it is nowadays so rarely used in critical debate. One reason for this is that abstract art broke with the European tradition to which Helen Lessore refers and which is, for her, characterised by a pronounced attention to natural appear- ances. 'It has always been the case', she writes, 'with every good painter that his work is a very subjective, personal and peculiar reflection of the visible world.' As can be seen, not only do her pronouns reveal her to be a poor feminist (and all the artists she discusses are male), but her thinking ignores non-representational art and is wholly untouched by current socio- political theories. She is an unblushing humanist. Art, for her, is the product of a heroically private act, not a mere carrier of ideology partaking alongside much every- day matter in the construction of social reality. Aware that s1.2. is writing amidst the 'ruins and confusion' of the late 20th century, she sets out to prove that the Great Tradition still exists, albeit now confined to a mere handful of artists. She begins with Giacometti. In his draw- ings she finds a link between Cezanne and the best art of today. Not only was Giacometti obsessed with representation, with capturing, like Cezanne, his 'sensa- tion' or experience, but he is also seen to exemplify, in an extreme degree, that searching, doubting, analytical tendency which Lessore later finds in artists as disparate as Frank Auerbach and Euan Uglow. This questioning tendency she associates with the 'modern Northern mind'. Like others before her, she divides the European tradition into opposing tend- encies which lean towards either the classic or romantic, the Mediterranean or North- ern. In addition she discerns a modern development, away from the absolute to- wards the accidental, from the public and heroic to the private, domestic and every- day.
These categories are not fixed, and certain of the artists discussed treat the accidental and mundane in generalised, classic terms. Francis Bacon, who makes something heroic out of the most private and least glorious moments of human life, is for her 'the great tragedian of the age'. But there are, surely, two views on Bacon, for where Lessore discerns the 'Grand Manner', others see only hollow manner- isms. Nevertheless her forcible opinions are for the most part persuasive. Bacon is, for her, a great religious artist because, owing to his acute unbelief and involve- ment with extremes, 'the negative becomes as religious as the positive'.
Elsewhere she finds moral qualities, notably endurance, in Leon Kossoff's art, in which she recognises a Jewish inheri- tance. Here again we find the individual and particular translated into the universal and grand. Likewise Auerbach and Evert Lundquist are praised for their creation of 'types'. By this Lessore means 'a monumental summary, distilled from countless observations and memories'.
When she first began working at the Beaux Arts (eight of the ten living artists discussed exhibited there) she often had the feeling, as she says, 'of being as it were in the kitchen and seeing the stuff actually made'. Surprisingly, the Kitchen Sink pain- ters, Bratby, Middleditch, Greaves and Smith, who were for a period so closely associated with her gallery they were dub- bed the 'Beaux Arts Quartet', are omitted from this book. Perhaps they have changed their styles too much to be eligible, for one characteristic shared by the artists under consideration is a fanatic pursuit of a narrow range of ideas. Similarly, Lessore's writing is penetrating but channelled. Just how restricting emphasis on the Great Tradition can be is revealed at the end of her book when she asks for a return to genre portrait painting. With Vermeer in mind, she argues that painting can still deal with the dignity and mystery of 'ordinary' life. This kind of painting, she believes, would oppose the proliferation of snap- shots, would offer something considered and monumental in place of the accidental and superficial.
This demand seems disappointingly modest when all the artists here dealt with have ambitions which strain rather than confirm conventions. Lessore's study of, besides those already mentioned, Craigie Aitchison, Andrews, Balthus, Freud and Raymond Mason, appreciably extends and deepens understanding of their work. This book benefits from what is often missing in more theoretically inquisitive art history: an intensity of looking. Lessore also has that rare ability to put into words thoughts and feelings aroused by a wordless art. She remarks of Lucian Freud: 'A brilliant unease flickers like summer lightning over his work . . . a sort of hidden storm which never breaks.' Equally perceptive is her observation that 1949 marked a turning point in Freud's career, when will took over from inspiration 'and he determined to become unassailable', a view which his aggressively particularised, if brilliantly performed, realism upholds.
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