Art academy opens doors to works it used to shun

Press, 23 February 1987, Page 6

Art academy opens doors to works it used to shun

NZPA-Reuter London Long criticised for neglecting avant-garde works, Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts has opened its doors to the most comprehensive survey ever of “modern” twentieth-cen-tury British art. The vast display includes the sort of painting and sculpture the staid Academy once shunned. "The British public have been slow to take up the idea of modem art and modern British art has had a very bad deal outside Britain,” said the exhibition’s secretary, Norman Rosenthal.

“It has had a reputation for a kind of reticence which is not entirely justified. This show makes clear that it can be quite strong-hitting.”

When the first London exhibition of modem European painters such as Cezanne and Matisse opened in 1910, Britons stood before the canvasses and shook their umbrellas in rage. Art historians say this response was due to the insularity and provincialism in British art. The organiser of the 1910 show hit out at the Royal Academy of Arts, the seat of the British art establishment, as a “colossal joke” which reinforced the hostility to modem works that did not mirror reality. Nearly 80 years on, the organisers of the current

survey invoke the exhibition sub-title, “The Modem Movement,” to explain the exclusion of traditional twentieth-cen-tury favourites of many Britons, among them Sir John Lavery and Augustus John, for failing to demonstrate a notion of “modem” which they define as a “persistent will to innovate.”

The vast display begins and ends with seedy images of London, from Walter Sickert’s views of boarding house chambers to photo collages scrawled with lewd Cockney graffitti by Gilbert and George.

“The more our art is serious, the more it will tend to avoid the drawing room and stick to the kitchen,” Sickert wrote of the rebellion against early twentieth-century conventions by artists who began calling themselves the Cambden Town group in 1911.

Three-quarters of a century later, Gilbert and George — a duo known by their first names alone — have photographed the crumbling neighbour-

hoods of east London and titled the results “Wanker” and “Prick Ass.”

Little of this explicit approach reached the Royal Academy’s annual summer review of contemporary works. Although there are some abstract and more vigorous figurative works the summer show includes a profusion of pastoral scenes and pet portraits. Some prominent modern painters whose works are now on exhibition, including Francise Bacon, continue to refuse the honour of becoming one of 50 members of the Academy, which promotes art education and runs a school.

The sculptor, Henry Moore, was said to have crossed the street whenever passing the Academy galleries.

“This exhibition is not an act of atonement or apology,” Rosenthal -said. “The Academy is a different place now. There is an element of tradition but it’s a completely open institution in a way that it wasn’t 20 years ago.”

The survey celebrates figures such as Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, inspired by the avantgarde movement in continental Europe to reject the British tradition of story-telling through sculpture and painting. An entire room is given over to drawings and sculpture by Moore, who spoke for many British modernists when he said in 1930 that he wanted “to realise again the intrinsic emotional significance of shapes instead of seeing mainly a representational value.”

Wyndham Lewis sought to create a British version of Cubism and Futurism, making a radical departure with a movement known as Vorticism. Other European movements also found expression here — Surrealism with Edward Burra and Paul Nash, Constructivism with Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicolson. ‘This is not an exhibition that relies on passport,” Rosenthal said. “If an artist spends all his life in Britain he is a

British artist.” Several reviewers have grumbled that the show falls short of providing a clear sense of what constitutes the “Britishness of British art.” “On the evidence provided by Walter Sickert at the start of the show, Gilbert and George at the end ... it is possible to conclude that there is a deep strain of misogny, self-disgust and miscreance running through British art," one critic wrote. In spite of the critics’ qualms, most have agreed that the exhibition demonstrates the quality of Britain’s modern artists, most of them scantily represented in foreign museums. “We have too long persuaded ourselves, and others have not been slow to take us at our word, that in the world of visual arts we are a non-visual nation, masters of the second-hand and second rate, said the art critic, William Packer. “This exhibition readily gives that prejudice the lie.”