Art For Argument's Sake

Press, Volume C, Issue 29466, 18 March 1961, Page 7

Art For Argument's Sake

ISpeciallg Written for "The Press" by R. R. BEAUCHAMP)

JIURRAH for the City Council ! To the rubbish dump with Mr McCahon and his works ! A peerage for Mr Baverstock and to the gallows with the Art Advisory Council. Or you can reverse these rewards and penalties—consigning our councillors to their own rubbish dump and buying all Mr •McCahon’s pictures and hanging them in the Council Chambers. It doesn't really matter which you do : the main thing is that we thrash this matter out. Like one of these new-fangled bombs that produce all kinds of side effects and turn men into monsters, an argument like this, if it reached some critical temperature, might even induce a few citizens to go and look at their own art gallery and ponder the place of painting and sculpture and poetry and drama in their own lives, and in the life of the communitv.

It is odd to see how the importance of these artistic and less practical values is ignored until some argument like this one breaks out — something that pulls our minds away from the downward trend of the butter market, the state of the Congo or the deplorable condition of the country’s finances. If a large part of life is indeed the pursuit of happiness, then the pleasure we get from looking at things of beauty must be a great help in that pursuit: whether the object we see is a child tittupping to school on a summer morning, the play of light on some old building, or the colour and order of the gardens in our prize street —though that is not everybody's cup of tea, Mind you, when it comes to arguments about art, I am right behind the City Councillors, who at least knew their own minds. But I do think they might have accepted the McCahon and kept it as an example to posterity. In fact. I think it was downright discourteous to Mr Hay not to take the picture off his hands. After all, Mr Hay has done a lot for our city and it's hardly fair to leave him to carry the baby that others have foisted on him. I note that, having failed to give it away, he says . . . "Well, somebody’s offered to buy it, anyway!” And, of course, the fact is that somebody might actually

do that very thing. There is a considerable market abroad for abstract paintings It seems to be shored up by a very vocal pressure group comprising: (1) the artists: (2) brother artists who can both draw and paint, but don't want to appear stuck in the mud or have the dreadful epithet “traditional” applied to them; <3> public institutions handling other people’s money; (41 and. most, important, sharp operators who acquire the produce of abstract, action. ashcan and other similar schools and. thanks to the efforts of 1. 2. and 3, turn them over at a tidy profit

Interview With Picasso

A curious confirmation of the above viewpoint has recently come my way. In the book. "Libro Nero,” the Italian author, Giovanni Papini, gives an account of an interview he had with Pablo Picasso. In the course of it Picasso says this of himself: "From the moment that art ceases to be the food that feeds the best minds, the artist can use bis talents to perform all the tricks of the intellectual charlatan. Most people can today no longer expect to receive consolation and exaltation from art. “The ‘refined,’ the rich, the professional do-nothings, the ’distillers of quintessence,’ desire only the peculiar, the sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today's art. And I, myself, since the advent of cubism, have fed these fellows with what they wanted and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that have passed through my head. The less they understood me the more they admired me. Through amusing myself with all these absurd farces I became celebrated—and very rapidly. For a painter, celebrity means sales and consequent affluence. Today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. “But when I am alone I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all; not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown. A mountebank. I have understood my time and 'nave exploited the embecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest.” I cannot yet verify the credentials of either the author or the book from which the above is quoted. I believe them to be genuine; the lan-

guage sounds to me like that of Pablo, the grand old panIjandrum of hocus pocus. Somebody will probably tell me that the recent Picasso exhibition at the Tate Gallery drew 30.000 viewers and that his works command fabulous prices. Well, that just goes to show that the old dictum about a sucker being born every minute, still holds: probably two a minute, at the world’s present birth rate.

All the same. I hope the City Council may yet revise its decision. They might do it out of courtesy to Mr Hay: or possibly to show people just what a New Zealander could contribute to the arts in this year of grace: or even in the hope, as expressed by some of your correspondents, that the painting will one day become fabulously valuable. Then we could sell it and buy a Titian, a Rembrandt, or a Goya!