Exhibitions 2
Sarah Chalmers
(New Grafton Gallery, till 14 March)
Art of the Ancient Andean Cultures (Accademia Italiana, till 15 March)
Communal arts
Giles Auty
In the past week I have had long and rewarding conversations with painters approaching their 70th year. The first was with a former pupil and then close associ- ate of the late David Bomberg whose name is Miles Peter Richmond, A fine selection from decades of his profuse and hitherto unseen output will be on view for the first time from 29 April at Park Grosvenor Gallery (86-90 Park Lane, W1). The sec- ond talk was with a Royal Academician with whom I had lunch in the tiny first- floor conservatory of his house in south- west London. While doing so the artist explained how he would have liked to extend this original structure a further 12 inches but desisted in the face of a neigh- bour's quietly expressed reservations.
In the planning jungle of big city life these days, such neighbourly consideration is probably even rarer than are artists who speak about their work with clarity and intelligence. In the conservation area in which I live, one of my neighbours has managed, in spite of my objections, to erect a solid 25 foot long structure rising to more than 20 feet to house an indoor swimming pool. This divisive edifice extends along our party wall some 35 feet beyond my building line and has been substituted for a traditional, all-glass conservatory of more modest size for which consent was obtained originally. My neighbour is not just an architect experienced at dealing with local authorities but possessor of a range of power tools which emit sounds so various that an ultra-modern symphony could be composed in their honour.
Those who might affect to enjoy the music resulting would probably deem my yearnings for the articulate and intelligent in art — or even for acts of neighbourly consideration — old-fashioned in the extreme. Indeed, younger citizens who do not remember a time when communities still tried to live politely and harmoniously even in big cities will not realise the extent of our collective loss now this is so seldom the case. Nor may such scions recall the days when the living art which made head- lines had anything about it that was attrac- tive, illuminating or intelligible. The supposed triumph of progress has meant that organisers of exhibitions of avant- garde work no longer even try to ratio- nalise these for paying audiences, many of the younger members of which probably assume the art they see will be ugly, opaque or meaningless. As with the grow- ing violence and selfishness of our commu- nal lives, they are unlikely to have known any better.
More than most suppose, the lot of thou- sands upon thousands of young, profession- ally trained artists in Britain depends on whatever critical values are currently in vogue. Clearly, if the value in art of the vapid, brutal and obscure is endlessly inflated, then the work of what is simply good and without pretension will be cast down by a similar margin. Those who use traditional artistic language, however great their skill and individuality, are likely to find themselves ignored when professional opportunities arise, for the latter have become the almost exclusive preserve of supposed trail-blazers. Young artists such as Sarah Chalmers, who shares an exhibi- tion at New Grafton Gallery (49 Church
Road, Barnes, SW13) with Duncan Oppen- heim, are typical of genuine talents which face an unnecessarily uphill struggle to gain wider recognition. Her imaginative water- colours of Spain, Ireland and other loca- tions are full of the movement of light and of an atmosphere which is powerfully evocative of these places. Here are vigor- ous, dramatic and well-structured works. In a time of recession, the continued existence of outlets such as David Wolfers's New Grafton Gallery is more vital than ever in providing a shop window for some of Britain's more talented but easily over- looked traditional artists.
In a week in which one of the greater irritations has been the inflated coverage given, even in supposedly intelligent media, to the now putative marital state of artist Jeff Koons, my major solace has come from contemplating priceless examples of pottery and fabrics made 2,500 to 1,000 years ago by craftsmen from ancient Andean cultures. Indeed, a small orange and beige plain vessel from 700-500 BC and others of similar antiquity are objects, as stage folk say, 'to die for'. In the instance of Nazca pottery surviving from the coastal valleys of Peru about 2,100 years ago this last may well have been the case, since its shapes echo the old warlike habit of 'trophy head-taking'. While such overtly bellicose acts make even the neigh- bourly hostilities of London suburbs pale by comparison, the sophisticated intricacy and elegance of fabric fragments from Huari, Chimu and Chucho cultures put the efforts of most modern cloth-makers simi- larly in the shade. In the first century BC textile art attained a zenith in southern Peru, while five centuries before that Cupisnique pottery had already established standards of simple perfection which remain hard to surpass even in our own enlightened times.
Nazca pottery jar, 100-700 Al), representing two trophy heads
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