As I Hear... The Great Bronze

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30745, 8 May 1965, Page 12

As I Hear... The Great Bronze

[By

J.H.E.S.]

Something has happened in Wellington that, I fancy, will presently have done more than anything else to end the long, rather foolish flow of contemptuous objections to abstract art. The Barbara Hepworth Bronze has arrived and been put on show at the National Art Gallery. This large shape, roughly globular, of irregularly broad,, curved bands of metal, represents nothing. It is selfsufficient and very beautiful. Seven men are needed to lift and place its mass; yet the effect is not that of cumbersome weight but of sorne-

thing self-poised, self-sus-taining, even airy. The bronze stands on a plain squared base centred upon a sufficient floor—sufficient to allow a view from varied distances and from angles all round, to say nothing of the first sight to be obtained on moving up through one of the galleries to this raised floor at the end of it.

The importance of viewing the bronze from all angles round it cannot be exaggerated. From each the curved bands are redistributed, the play of interior and exterior light shifts on their lustrous surfaces, and the thing assumes fresh proportions and values accordingly; and in every variation it remains its total and lovely self, much as the sea does, under sun, as you traverse a hillside. If there is any one respect in which, above others, this bronze declares itself a notable work of art, it is this respect of its completing and justifying its design from every point of view. Yet, at present, I have a favourite: one from which the interior seems to shimmer, as from no other, with a soft green light. But it will not surprise me if, as I go back and back again. I find another, or others, to rival it.

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To go back to the beginning, why do I think the purchase and exhibition of this bronze may gradually silence squeaks and bellows against abstract art? Simply because this is abstract art, and because I can imagine nobody who, having eyes to see and the courage to let them persuade him, will at least not feel his prejudice against abstract art to be disturbed, however deep-seated it may be.

I hope I am not being too hopeful when I imagine a hostile critic—such as Mr T. H. Pearce the Rugby football professor, who could see nothing in Auckland’s Hepworth but a happy resemblance to a cow’s rump—pausing to say to himself, "Abstract art? Well, perhaps if this is abstract art, I may not have thrown in the ball too straight.” Most rages against development in art, if it is well based and well pursued, are defeated by time; but as often as not there comes a crucial moment, a crucial occasion, to which you may attribute the turn. So it may be here.

When you come to think of it, it is odd that the common rage against abstract art should have been concentrat* ed against painting and drawing and statuary. It is not as though abstraction were new in these branches of the visual arts. Go back as far as you like and you find it. Who invented the famous key pattern, still used on dinner sets and tea sets? It is pure abstract. The famous willow pattern on china is far too unrealistic to be called, or to be, representational; it is abstract.

Take the very first plate in Goldscheider’s “Art without Epoch.” It represents a human figure in stone, probably an idol. It came from the Greek Islands and dates from the third millenary, B.C. The forms are abstract, using the moulding effect of light and shade. A modern sculptor, producing this figure, could still be abused as an exponent of "modernistic” rubbish and the follies of “abstract art.”

But pass the question of the antiquity of abstract art in the visual media. All arts, somebody said, aspire to the condition of music; and of all arts music is most completely dedicated to, and bound to, abstraction. Its tonal scales are abstractions.

Every musician knows that, by and large, the music written to represent scene or action, the music generally called “programme” music, is mostly of secondrate value or none. Music written under a title that seems to give it a representational quality will usually be found, if it is good, to represent nothing but the composer's mood and musical ideas, suggested by the occasion or theine suggested in the title. Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” no more “represents” moonlight than Chopin’s so-called Revolutionary study represents revolution or the Butterfly study represents butterflies. It is quite true that composers draw rhythms, figures, and even themes from the audible world about them: the rhythms of rustic dances, the phrase of a huntsman’s or a coachguard’s horn, the tunes of a folk-song. But these are not “represented” but developed as, you might say, quotations embedded in a work or as part of its thematic material, which is abstract. I have in mind Beethoven’s inimitably vigorous, comical use of themes from the village green or the inn, his fateful knock at the door

(which he may have thought of or not, I don’t know), and the post-horn phrase in his most charming symphony; these examples and a hundred more. The great composer composes tones and texture and rhythms in his own medium; he does not "represent,” except by quoting and adapting or by suggestion, the audible or visual world; and his medium is abstract None of the above is intended to imply (and none of it does imply) that abstract art is good because it is abstract, any more than representational art is good because it is representational. Second-raters, imitators, and exploiters will produce second-rate or worthless work in either style. The point is the contrary one: that abstract art will be condemned by nobody who can tell a bad shape from a good one, a clean, living line from a senseless, muffed one, a lovely surface from a coarse or garish or dull one, merely because it is abstract. # St d

I end as 1 began, upon hopes. First, I hope Christchurch visitors will turn in increasing numbers to the National Art Gallery to see the Hepworth—and, while they remain, the Auckland Hepworth and the Masterton Hepworth, now on loan. It will be a happy precedent if these loans lead to an occasion when all three Hepworths may be seen in Christchurch.

Second, I hope that Christchurch visitors may help to promote in Christchurch a move to make a purchase as good or, if possible, better. Inter-parochial rivalry has its unlovely side; but I cannot think this unlovely side will be shown if Christchurch makes up its mind and its purse to buy a piece as good as Wellington’s, or better. Superiority does not seem to me likely; but I shall rejoice if I have to concede it.