TRENDS IN ART

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22744, 3 December 1935, Page 3

TRENDS IN ART

BERNARD SHAW’S VIEWS Mr Bernard Shaw wrote a characteristic preface to the catalogue of Professor Sigismond de Strobl’s exhibition of his sculptures at a Hanover square art gallery in London recently, says the Daily Telegraph. For the first time for many years, says Mr Shaw r , it is possible “for n native of these islands to contemplate his own portrait without cursing the day he had consented to sit for it.” He makes no attempt to disguise his admiration for this Hungarian sculptor who, arriving unknown to him on these shores with a commission from an equally unknown Hungarian patron of the arts, made "an image of my venerable head for the information of Hungarian anthropologists and the admiration of mankind at large ” with great success. The de Strobl vogue among celebrities, as this exhibition shows, has followed and now approaches that of Rodin in his hey-dey. Mr Shaw attributes it to Professor do Strobl’s ability to bring out in his busts " anything of delicacy or nobility” that his sitters possess. He adds that the sculptor has been able in his portrait to express a “ genuine poetry of form.” But Mr Shaw delves deeper, and credits Professor de Strobl with producing no less than a post-war resurrection of classic sculpture in a purer and a more appropriate form. He makes characteristic references to the confusion of thought and ideas which afflicts the modern artist, to the growth of sun-bathing and the consequent better appreciation of the human form, to the primitive and unspoiled beauty of the naked savage, and to the reaction to that other great sculptor, Jacob Epstein. “Long before the shock of the war,” Mr Shaw writes, “ classicism in sculpture and painting were achieving nothing but senseless nudes, with Greek outlines so dead that they could not produce even an aphrodisiac effect on the pruriently overclothed Victorians. When sun bathing set in after the ivar their stony nothingness left them fit only for the road mender’s hammer. “ But the moral shock of the war went deeper than the sun bath exposure. We hath found out what destructive fools we all were; and a rage for rubbing in this discovery seized on our most Sensitive artists

“ Had they lived a few centuries ago, they would have confronted us with skulls and skeletons, and with the humours of Holbein’s Dance of Death. But now that they are all amateur psycho-analysts and evolutionary anthropologists, their delight is to reduce us to the primeval types from which, they imply, our evolution is only a hypocritical pretence. > “In doing so, however, they discovered that savages have a beauty of their own; that black women in Africa can out-fascinate Rossetti’s Rose of Sharon, and brown women in Tahiti make painters unfaithful for ever to the models of the Parisian ateliers. “An extraordinary muddle was the result. Our artists wanted to debunk their sitters morally by showing them what savages they were underneath their civilised prettinesses, and yet at the same time wanted to force on them something of the beauty of savages “For instance, Jacob Epstein, an American sculptor, would not _ have classicism on any terms. He rejected Greek outlines contemptuously as quite simple English lies and broke up the brassy surfaces of his busts in bis determination to make them flesh.” According to Mr Shaw, de Strobl has arrived sedately and without apology to capture London because be makes extremely handsome busts of contemporary civilised persons as such. “ Each bust was not only an authentic and instantly recognisable portrait of the sitter, but something quite apart from that; a work of art.”