LondonAuthor(s): Keith RobertsSource: The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 110, No. 782 (May, 1968), pp. 299-301Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/875658 .

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CURRENT AND FORTHCOMING EXHIBITIONS

and very sad they are. This artist has always been uneven, but lately he has been more un than even, and I would prefer to think that the present show was put to- gether simply because he needs some money; that at least is a respectable reason. But the art - or, where there is not meant to be art, the thought - is bankrupt: square dumbbells that are hollow, and so are useless for the weightlifter; a loaf of French bread made of blue plastic said to be 'Ideal Food for the Birds'; a silver paperweight in the shape of a phallus. It was conspicuous consumption at its most pathetic. The oils by Joan Mitchell, in the main gallery, are another thing. Miss Mitchell is one of a very few artists who continue to work in an Abstract-Expres- sionist style, which to me seems fine - her paintings have always had a validity of their own, even when prevalent taste appreciated them. She shows now loosely but solidly brushed canvases of luminous white punctuated by rough, roundish areas of rich blue or green. Their tone is subdued, but lyrical, and I feel that, as always, their ultimate inspiration was in landscape, but this is very tenuous: has she been looking at Kupka ? The work is well bred, but not lacking in vigour, decorative, serious but not as profound as one would like.

Robert Schoelkopf, who is much in- clined to rediscover artists in whom some (but not too much) merit was formerly seen, has now come up with Jane Peterson (1876-1965; the work shown, mostly gou- aches, is from 19Io to 1920). If she had been young in the I950's, I think she would have painted like Joan Mitchell, but she had the luck to be young when the prevailing style was a genteel, synthetic idiom that was very appropriate to her talents, which are the opposite of tempes- tuous. Her Gloucester street scene is what Vuillard would have done had he visited Gloucester; her dance-hall is Sargent after a visit to the Moulin Rouge; her garden of Louis Comfort Tiffany at Oyster Bay is appropriately art-nouveau, a mild Klimt. I am fond of shows such as this because, since they depend on the work of painters I, like everyone else, know very well, they allow me to think I am very clever; it is the ideal party game, a guessing contest in which you are sure to win. The pictures are so pleasant you almost forget that many of them are very good. JERROLD LANE5

London If there is one thing that the large, retros- pective exhibition at the Tate Gallery (until I9th May) makes clear, it is that the best way to appreciate Barbara Hepworth's sculpture is to relax and enjoy it. Forget her place in the development of modern British sculpture; ignore the cross references to the work of Henry Moore, with whom she studied, and Ben Nicholson, whom she married; and eliminate, if possible all those associations with landscape that commentators are always describing and

on which the artist herself insists. For by dismantling the apparatus of comment and criticism which has been built up round her work over the years, one comes to see her achievements in their true light. It is not an ambiance as radiant as journa- lism and publicity would have one believe; but that is surely only fair. Miss Hep- worth's talent is not of a Promethean order.

Where she really excels is in her feeling for sensuous shapes and lustrous surfaces. This is already evident in the beautiful onyx Toad of 1928 - carved when she was 25 - and it is what makes so many of her small works precious in the most com- plimentary sense. She is a fine craftsman and in the exhibition there are pieces of polished bronze, and alabaster, and iron stone, that are, quite simply, beautiful objects, in the same way as an early Chinese bowl or a de Lamerie tea-pot are beautiful. I haven't seen sculpture for a long time that evokes so keenly the desire to touch, to caress.

It is when one starts re-applying all the usual terms of reference, however, that troubles begin. In comparison with Henry Moore Miss Hepworth has concentrated almost exclusively on abstract forms. But precisely because of this, and because her fondness for smooth texture concentrates attention on the surfaces in detail, the forms invite a degree of scrutiny they can- not always sustain. Too often do they ap- pear heavy and unimaginative. Compared with an Arp, for example, Sea Form (Fig.92) doesn't quite make the grade, it lacks buoyancy; there is something leaden about it. In a similar way, Miss Hep- worth's more angular, geometric sculp- tures are without that supreme crystalline purity that one finds in the best work of Nicholson or Mondrian. And she does not deploy strings, or wires, with anything like the same finesse as Naum Gabo.

After a second visit to the exhibition, one is forced to the ungallant conclusion that although it is never vulgar, always worthy and often clever, much of Miss Hepworth's sculpture is really a little dull. There is something missing, some tiny, but crucial, spring of creative vitality that no amount of art history or explanation can quite re- place. This may be why her grander pieces appear large rather than monumental and why, unlike Moore, she is at her best on a small scale. It is perhaps also symptomatic of this deficiency that (again unlike Moore), in spite of her manifest intentions, she does not really make the analogies with natural forms in her sculpture really work. Superficially, yes: holes, concavities and inlets are carved out of the resisting sur- faces, as the sea wears away the rocks along the coast. But standing in front of Pendour (1947) or Tides II (1947), I cannot honestly say I feel this, as one does feel the pressure of nature in Moore's sculpture or, come to that, in Wuthering Heights. What one does feel, rather, is an intelligent and sensitive mind at work, solving a given problem, and producing something that is often both attractive and entertaining:

but touched with divine fire - no! It is really a matter of having a style that will do the job; and Miss Hepworth's style seems to me best suited to the creation of small, beautiful objects of a fundamentally nerveless character. By that I do not mean to imply that they are not worth having. Far from it. Beautiful objects, at any time, are rare.

Three recent exhibitions - devoted to Tristram Hillier (Tooth's), Ruskin Spear and Carel Weight (both at the Leicester Gallery's new premises in Cork Street) - have been particularly interesting as reve- lations of essentially academic talents in various types of disguise. Mr Hillier's world of empty streets and deserted beaches under the harsh glare of the Mediterran- ean sun, is still under the spell of a sur- realist enchanter; but as the years go by, and as the images become, almost imper- ceptibly, slicker and more glib, one begins to suspect that it is only a trick of the brush and the magnifying glass, the work not of a magician but a conjurer.

Superficially at least, nothing could be more different than the work of Mr Spear, who is all dash and go, with plenty of strong colour and broadly handled paint deployed in the service of raffish imagery, a world of suburban beaches, bedrooms and cheap cafes. He might be described as a John Bratby who worships at the altar of Degas, so fond is he of the obliquely placed figure, the artfully casual gesture, the portrait without apparent subter- fuge. And it is only after a prolonged study that one begins to sense a certain deadness at the centre, a bluff, hearty adoption of basically second-hand counters.

On the surface, Mr Weight is more in- teresting. A kind of Edvard Munch of Belsize Park, he is adept not only at con- juring up, with the aid of ramshackle per- spective and odd colour, the woodshed at the bottom of the garden, but also at suggesting that there is something rather nasty in it. There hangs over his work an aura of anxiety, as if his houses were on the brink of a nervous breakdown and his quite ordinary people were being swept along in the wake of some terrible disaster. So successful has Mr Weight been in the past at evoking this mood that it is only recently and, in particular, at the present, exhibition, that it has begun to dawn on one there might be slightly less to his work than meets the eye. The Presence is a classic case in point; this large picture is so quintessentially Carel Weight that in seeing through it, one seems to see into all his work. The scene is a public park at sunset; women and children pass in front of the railings, and a blind man with a stick pauses by the kerb. In the centre, appropriately insubstantial in form, is a female figure in period costume. The can- vas is carefully and, after its fashion, very well painted, but when all is said and done it is rather banal. It is just the kind of thing Millais might have painted - and, come to think of it, almost did paint in Speak! Speak!

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CURRENT AND FORTHCOMING EXHIBITI ON

Lucian Freud - an exhibition of whose recent work is to be seen at Marlbor- ough's until 4th May - is less 'imaginative' than Mr Weight, there is less obvious mystery about his pictures, but in spite of their mostly routine subject-matter they are more gripping. Reclining nudes and domestic portraits make up the bulk of the show and they are remarkable for their steady, penetrating observation, and a brand of tender ruthlessness, an implicit suggest that anything less than the truth would be an insult and therefore unkind. The most remarkable canvas of all, The interior with plant - reflection listening (Fig.95), is also the most elaborate. As a formal proposition, it is comparable to Mr Freud's famous Interior at Paddington (now in Liverpool), but it is in many respects subtler. The strange power of the picture lies not in distortion but in juxtaposition, as it does in the lines of Pinter, who can create similar moods of domestic unease. The giant plant - and it is brilliantly painted - takes up most of the space, so that the small, subdued image of the artist seems almost choked out by the monster growth, which, even while one stands in front of the canvas, seems to grow larger and larger.

Finally, and also at Marlborough, an excellent selection of drawings and water- colours by George Grosz (Figs.93, 94). Although, art historically, they add little to the Arts Council's 1963 exhibition, they do suggest that on that occasion one may have slightly underrated Grosz. I am thinking in particular of his extraordinary capacity to be, with one and the same set of fine lines, both formally delicate - to the point of evoking Klee - and ferociously satirical. This, one feels, is what Berlin was really like in the I920's; and com- parison with the current musical about 'decadent' Berlin, Cabaret, underlines a perhaps even more important point about Grosz: to show up decadence for what it is, one requires a moral standpoint as well as technical know-how. KEITH ROBERTS

Tissot Retrospectivel In the Paris of the early I86o's, James Jacques Joseph Tissot found himself sur- rounded by all of the right artistic influ- ences. He registered as a copyist at the Louvre and entered the studio of Lamothe to learn academic painting. (Here, it seems, he began his friendship with Degas.) He was friendly with Whistler, lived above Daudet, and was probably a frequent visitor to French literary salons as soon as he arrived in Paris in the mid-I850's. He responded to Courbet's art: in the

Marguerite at the Well, I861, a highly successful painting, the forest background is set down with paint of a rich consistency in beautiful greys, greens, and browns d la Courbet. Over the academically rendered rocks near the figure, Tissot has applied streaks of grey paint with a palette knife in imitation of the methods of the great Realist. He must have been greatly affec- ted by Ingres. In his most beautiful paint- ing, the Woman in the Red Jacket, I864, (Fig.96) we sense hours spent studying the effects of the Portrait of Mme d'Haussonville. And like Degas, even while he was paint- ing contemporary portraits in the style of Ingres, he was dressing up his models for medieval tableaux. He also followed the trend toward awareness of modern life and seems to have committed himself to the view that modern painting must in- clude the recording of one's own time. His Dejauner sur l'herbe from the mid-sixties recalls Manet's Tuileries Gardens, and other outdoor scenes. He participated with gusto in the explosion of interest in oriental ob- jects. In the i86o's he was among the first to buy Japanese costumes and porce- lains, and he bought them in enormous quantities. At least five of his paintings of this period are listed as having Japanese subjects.

Tissot's early works are so saturated with identifiable influences that it is diffi- cult to discern in them the individual artistic personality of their creator or to determine the extent of his ability. The fact that these influences are also apparent in the work of those of his contemporaries who were to emerge as the great painters of the late nineteenth century gives Tissot's early work, in retrospect, an aura of promise. Nevertheless, the superficiality and the quirks are there.

His japonisme is a case in point: in Lady in a Japanese Costume the figure is sumptu- ously dressed in at least two embroidered kimonos and has a fan in her belt. She holds up a piece of porcelain in each hand like an advertisement. The face of the figure is an odd conglomeration of orien- tal features, slanted eyes, a thick, short nose. The mouth has been copied from that of a Japanese doll where the lips are often parted to show the little individual teeth and even the tongue. Tissot's japon- isme never went beyond enthusiastic mim- icry of detail. Never were the principles of Japanese design which so excited Degas, Gauguin, or Monet ever incorporated by Tissot into his paintings with any great success (note for example, the little pair of crossed feet cut off from a body outside the picture frame in the lower left corner of The Picnic, c.I877, in the Tate Gallery).

Tissot's limitations became fully ap- parent in the pictures painted in England, where he went to live in 1872 after his participation in the Commune. His period of training was over. He exhibited at the Royal Academy and became a second-rate society painter and a financial success. It is difficult to account for the extreme retardation of Tissot's style which began

to show up in the London paintings, and continued through the illustrations to the Bible done at the end of his life. That something very strange indeed happened may be seen by comparing the Woman in the Red Jacket, 1864, to the Return from Henley, early 188o's, made just before Tissot's return to Paris. Could it be the result of Tissot's own idiosyncrasies (e.g. his weakness for the picturesque, which earlier had made him try to emulate the medievalizing Belgian painter Henry Leys) their French veneer now corroded by a new environment dominated by the poor artistic taste, ugly painted surfaces, mys- tical allusions and literary associations which were the legacy of the Pre-Raphae- lites ?

Society painters require society, but Tissot renounced London life and friends after beginning a liaison with Mrs Kath- leen Newton, a neighbour, in I876. The subjects of his paintings are often based on the activities of Mrs. Newton, her sister, Mrs Harvey, and their children. The face of Mrs Newton recurs endlessly in Tissot's paintings, drawings, and etch- ings. Her features have been given to every woman in the crowd in the Amateur Circus, one of the 'Femmes d Paris' series.

Tissot's deterioration as a painter shows up in the 'Femmes d Paris' which he made to mark his return to Paris after Mrs Newton's death from consumption in I883. It is hard to believe that the same man who painted this series had done the Cercle de la Rue Royale, or the Marguerite at the Well. The paint is thick, coarse, and ugly. The colours are not pure, but have been mixed to a pink-grey dirtiness. The senti- ments are amusing but overly obvious and overly literary.

Why should Tissot be the subject of a retrospective exhibition? Pure amusement is one reason. Tissot's work is enormously rich in details of life and taste in the second half of the nineteenth century. Details in his compositions tell of the fads of the period. The ball fringe trimming on the bright red jacket in the Woman in the Red Jacket reminds us of the Second Em- pire's preoccupation with and attraction to things Spanish. In Tissot's painting we can see exactly what people placed on their mantelpieces, took with them on picnics, carried with them on tours, or what they covered garden benches with to make them more comfortable. The paintings tell us how menus were protected from the wea- ther in an outdoor restaurant. A beautiful etching records the use of the gallery of the Comddie Franpaise as a hospital ward during the Siege of Paris. We learn from Tissot's work how hair fell on the back of a woman's neck in the i88o's or the way ladies com- bined long gloves with long sleeves. The Cercle de la Rue Royale was particularly appealing to the undergraduates at the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University for the variety in the styles of the beards.

The psychological interest in Tissot's work is equally interesting. Frequently,

1 The Retrospective Exhibition of works by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836-1902) is the result of the co-operation of the Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. It opened in Providence, 28th February through 29th March, 1968. It will continue in Toronto from 6th April through 5th May 1968.

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92. Sea Form (Porthmeor), by Barbara Hepworth. 1958. Bronze; height, I 17 cm. (Tate Gallery; Exh. Tate Gallery.)

93. Melancholie (from Ecce Homo), by George Grosz. Signed. 1918. Ink drawing, 36-5 by 29-9 cm. (Exh. Marlborough Fine Art (London), Ltd.)

94. Vergnuegt, by George Grosz. Signed. g92o. Indian ink, 36-8 by

27"3 cm. (Exh. Marlborough Fine Art (London), Ltd.)

95. Interior with plant - reflection listening, by Lucian Freud. 1967-8. Canvas, 122 by 122 cm. (Exh. Marlborough Fine Art (London), Ltd.)

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