THE ACADEMY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 108, 8 May 1937, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE ACADEMY.

m ART, ARTISTS AJTD AUTHORS. (By CYRANO.) The Academy opened this week. If our cable news is justified in describing the show as unsensational—save for the allegorical picture that was removed because it was thought to point to or suggest the choice made by Edward Vlll.—wo may be sure that, held on the eve of the Coronation, the opening attracted an unusually large and brilliant gathering. The Academy is more than an exhibition of pictures and sculpture; it is a society function. It is part of the London season, and everybody who is anybody and everybody who is not but would like to be, is to be seen there. It was once said of the mothers and sisters and cousins and aunts who went to Eton-Harrow match at Lord's, that they sometimes looked at the cricket. West End mothers and daughters who go to the Academy sometimes look at the pictures. The Academy's Prestige. This, the social side of the Academy, has helped to bring it into disrepute among many artists and lovers of art; ,but the Academy continues to enjoy high official prestige, and the mass of English people, and colonials too, are still influenced by the Academy's standing. If a man is an R.A. he must be a great artist, a view that is received with hoots of derision, if not silent contempt, in some quarters.

The official English attitude to art reflects, I think, the taste of the governing classes. Far more is done for painting than for any other art. The aristocracy have always been patrons of painting, if only because they wanted v.c have their own portraits done. There haye been noted collectors among the nobility, and as a result many works by great artists of all countries have been secured for the nation. Consequently the idea took root that painting, being something that a gentleman could interest himself in, was an art worthy of State support. The Government can find £100,000 for two old masters —though England is rich in such art—but it will not find money for a national theatre. The drama is still not quite respectable. Many Are Called. The extent to which Academy approval is regarded as the hall-mark of English art may be gauged by the number of works sent in. These totalled 16,000 this year, of which about 1600 have been accepted. One in ten. Think of the high hopes raised by all this work, and the disappointment suffered. Carry your reflection further, and consider that this process has been going on for decades. However, rejected artists have this grim consolation, that the life of accepted pictures is mostly short. What has become of all the pictures accepted by the Academy in the last hundred years ? What percentage of them have any appreciable value in the auction room to-day? I doubt if the figure is as high as five; it might be as low as one.

There is something melancholy in the thought of such failure and transience, but of course this is not confined to picturial art. Think of the books that are never published, or if published last little longer than butterflies. How many books are written in a year in addition to those published, only a conference of publishers could estimate. It is a long while since, Andrew Lang calculated, that a hundred thousand novels were written every year in England, and the number must be vastly greater .to-day. All culture involves huge effort like this; many are called, but few are chosen. Writers have this advantage over artists, that—paradoxically—even when their books are dead, there may bo life in them for the curious. It is seldom that a book cannot yield any interest. A dead picture is very dead indeed. Craft of the Hand. The majority of those who write and paint have to be satisfied with the pleasure they derive from their labour. Here, I think, the artist has a great advantage over the writer. He works with his hands as well as his brain, and produces something solid and tangible. His pursuit is a handicraft as well as an art. The writer can work anywhere —didn't Bernard Shaw think out hi.-; early plays in underground trains?—and with no more material than an envelope and the stub of a pencil. The act of putting words down on paper is purely mechanical. The artist must have his gear—his brushes, paints, canvas and easel—and often he must find a material subject. It has been advanced as a reason for tho number of failures in the married lives of writers and artists (I haven't any statistics, and perhaps these arc not exceptionally numerous) that the man, instead of going off to his work f«ir the day, is about the .house, and husband and wife see too much of each other. I suggest that in this respect the artist is a more satisfactory husband than the writer. While the writer moons round the house, the painter packs his kit and goes off for the morning, or perhaps the whole day. I judge his work to be much more soothing than 'that of literary composition. The picture grows under his hand; he feels he is making something, as he were a. carpenter or a weaver. The value of hand-work as a hobby for men and women who earn their living by their brains is well recogised. I should say that as a class artists are a good deal less nervy than writers.

Some of my readers will remember that delightful story of Stevenson's "Providence and the Guitar." There a pair of strolling French entertainers and a wandering Englishman come upon a young couple in a domestic crisis. The husband is an artist, but not a good one. He has been offered a position in a bank, and his wife, tired of poverty and foreseeing nothing but that in the future, is enraged that he will not accept. The other woman, who is also faced by poverty, gives this advice: "Frankly I would let my husband do what he wished. He is obviously a very loving painter; you have not yet tried* him as a clerk. And you know—if it were only as the possible father of your children— it is well to keep him at his best." So it is decided. This artist will never really succeed, but he has a chance of being happy, a better chance, I think, than a writer of the same class. A writer is never satisfied until he sees his stuff in print; that is his only practicable method of securing what is technically called "publication." The artist "publishes" through his act of painting; at any rate his friends can see the result of his work. But more important is the feeling of satisfaction to which I have referred, satisfaction at seeing something actually created. There are numbers of undistinguished artists who «ro on painting indefatigably year after year, perhaps without selling a picture. Their zest for their art is not a whit diminished by their frank realisation that they will never set any Thames on fire. The- happiness they seem to find has a lesson for those who are in the habit of measuring that state by worldly standards.