U.K. painting exhibition

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32905, 2 May 1972, Page 15

U.K. painting exhibition

At present being displayed in the Robert McDougall Art Gallery and The Canterbury Society of Arts Gallery is an

exhibtion called “Recent British Painting.” The exhibition was brought to New Zealand by the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation and the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand, assistance for the tour within the country being provided by the Auckland City Art Gallery. The exhibition holds some' important implications for painters in New Zealand in that for most of this century training programmes for artists have often been based on those being used in Britain though generally with a considerable time lag. It is not too unreasonable to suggest that much of what we see in this exhibtion could begin to occur in New Zealand painting in several years hence, if indeed it has not already begun to do so, and such a prospect is, at the very least, alarming. “JOYLESS PAINTINGS” Perhaps because we have seen it all before in books, or perhaps because of the thousands of words that have been Written in praise, support, explanation or justification or possibly because our vision is already soured by imitators whatever the reason, it is difficult to fight back an all pervading sense of despair when faced with so many large, empty, grimly gay and joyless paintings. The exhibition is intended! to show the main tendencies I

in British painting since the early 19605. It begins with examples of the work of several artists who helped to revitalise the visual arts in Britain after World War 11. Painters such as Ivan Hitchins, Ben Nicholson, Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland, Ori Richards, Victor Passmore and William Scott broke with the “typically English” traditions of landscape painting to grapple with the basic problems of modem art.

Problems were mostly already well defined by European artists earlier in the century.

Golour and brush strokes become the vehicle of expression for Hitchons, while harsh emphatic forms and a total lack of sentimentality are characteristics of Sutherland's work. Nicholson’s com-1 positions are marked by al startling austerity with No. 1, a long horizontal relief, “March 64 (Sirius)” being one of the outstanding paintings in the exhibtion. William Scott is seen as having in his work, apart from a “latent eroticism,” a “unique gift of putting forms down where we least expect them and making them look just right.” Francis Bacon, renowned as “a pioneer of human awareness,” is represented by an unpitying self portrait full of “the distortion and sweeping brush strokes that allow him to reinvent his subject.” INTERNATIONAL IDEAL From here on, attention swings to the next generation of painters, from an Anglo-French cultural axis to a London-New York one, to styles of painting apparently reflecting London as an open city with all thoughts of nationalism giving way to internationalism as an ideal and new way of life. Much of this work, it should be remembered, was produced against a background of music provided by the Beatles and (fashions set by Carnaby (Street.

I Colour for its own sake is the concern of Patrick Heron, ritualistic and explosive designs painted with Jackson Pollock-like energy is the hallmark of Alan Davies’s paintings. Optical effects that might be thought of as studies in psychological dislocation distinguish Bridget Riley’s paintings, and Jack Smith’s brightly-coloured rhythmical hieroglyphics are equally concerned, like Riley, with visual perception. Altogether, 50 artists are

represented in the exhibition, and while it is impossible to gain any understanding of the range and depth of any one person’s output from such a brief encounter with so few examples of their painting, one suspects that much of the work, particularly of the younger painters, may have (already suffered at the hands of fickle fate and have passed out of fashion, just as the Beatles and Carnaby Street. The exhibition will close on May 12.—G.T.M.