Queensland Art Gallery Presscuttings Book 1 : Presscuttings, 1959-1962

4 O'Adetia MARCH 18, 1953 The Modernist French Exhibition AN EMETIC IN OIL -PAINT THE only puzzle about the exhibition of Modernist French painting now on the walls of the N. S. Wales National Gallery is why the trustees have elected to hold it at this date, when its imbecilities have long since reached satiation-point with any cultured response to plastic art. I saw the first Post-Impressionist exhi- bition in London away back in the year 1911. Examples of the same crude infantilities have been scattered broad- cast ever since in prints and art -publica- tions till the publishers of these inanities have used up their public, and bookiellers are no longer stocking their products, as nobody will buy them. Instead, there are now coming from the art -presses reproductions of the world's greatest paintings, and that in it- self is the evidence that the cult of Modernistic Primitivism is defunct. Be- sides, the buffoons who inaugurated it are now either dead or old men, and that, again, spells finality to it, by the inevit- able swing-over of one generation from the plastic creed of the one that preceded it. Modernist art has never been an lesthetle but a studio cultism, propaganded by newspaper art -critics and the astute art -dealers who capitalised the journa- listic publicity to sell their wares to that fiction of the moneyed public (mainly rich Americans) who can be duped into paying money for anything popularised as a fashion -craze. Rich Americans with taste have bought nothing but works accredited by the highest standard of connoisseurship, so that America has now acquired some of the world's greatest masterpieces. Modernistic art has always been rejected by the one source of authoritative opinion that can have validity, and that is from painters who have already achieved distinction on an established tradition of sound painting, and from the cultured arttbuyers who have col- lected their works. It can't be repeated too often that there can be no other authoritative standard of values save this exchange between artist and buyer, for it is based on that unity between creation and perception without which art could not exist. Anyone who follows the resale of pictures from notable collections will see this process in action at any Aus- tralian auction -room today. The works by painters who have established the tradition of sound painting in this country continue to soar in value with every resale. To my knowlede no pro- duct of Modernistic art has ever found a buyer there. For all the feverish tub-thumping by a few journalistic art -critics over the pre- sent exhibition of Modernist French art, that cult is as dead as mutton. I would not have crossed the road to look at it if I had not received a number of indig- nant letters from people whose taste I respect, and who are seriously concerned for the dignity of art in this country. For my part, a glance at the verbosities of the newspaper art -critics in praise of the exhibition was enough to assure me that its exhibits were worthless: and, any- way, I have long since lost any interest in the Modernist revolt, even from the one aspect that can be of interest, which is its pathological reversion to a state of infantilism. But I allowed myself to be coerced into paying a visit to the Gallery. And I was really staggered to find again how incredibly bad the stuff was, even from its own acclaimed slogan of having discarded all standards of excel- lence in painting. I did my best to find some evidence that this insensate debauch of splodging paint on canvas had any genesis in mankind's prolonged struggle to develop the thumb which controls the use of a tool ; but could only find two examples which showed some evidence of craftsmanship. One was a still-life with a certain harmonic quality by an recent of black on a basis of red and ellow, and the other a combination of Cues, greens and reds toned down to ve an effect of color-unity if viewed au a distance. It need not be added t any sense for form was lacking in h exhibits. Finally, with some reluct- - !, I performed that exercise defined ,he studio idiom as putting my nose ) the paint to examine the quality of 'npasto. In the whole of that exhi- there was no evidence that its *dm knew that such a thing as an impasto existed. Which is to say, revert- ing from the plastic idiom to that which uses words as its medium, the mental level which bad produced these exhibits was hardly up to that of a child of eight, and a backward child at that... I must pause here to comment on the one really exasperating aspect of the whole Modernist revolt from standard values in art, and that is not the drivelling nature of its works, but the affirmation of those works which has come from a number of writers who are themselves meticulous stylists in the metier of words. But, passing them for the moment, it may be well to dispose of the affirmation of Modernistic art by the newspaper critics. The function of the newspaper art - critic is to attack all expressions of high quality in art. Defined roughly, this attack constitutes an engurance-test o a the artist to ignore it, and his works to survive it. It springs, of course, from a fermenting state of frustration by a con- sciousness of inferiority forced on such mentalities in the presence of any high achievement in the arts. I dare say it has always attended such achievements in the pre-newspaper past, but only since the beginning of last cen- tury, with its sudden and widespread production of newspapers and journals, have we been able to watch its procedure in action. In poetry, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and Browning have been selected for its most vicious attacks. In music, Beethoven and Wagner. In paint- ing, Turner, Constable, Etty, Colman, do Windt-and, in short, any painter who showed evidence of high quality in his works. I have gone to the trouble at times of digging up such evidences of journalistic spleen, and have discovered that the painters on whom those critics lavished adulation have never since their day been heard of. And therein is the doom of Modernistic art already consti- tuted irrevocably. The journalist attack continued through the 'seventies and 'eighties on the Impressionist movement, which was headed by Degas, Menet and Monet, P d continued down to the 'nineties in the fury aroused by Sargent's portrait of Madame Gautreau, which drove Sargent out of Paris to settle in England. And that was a good thing for England, for Sargent may be accepted as the prime stimulus to that fine group of painters headed by Orpen, Lavery, Nicholson, Munnings and John. These are the real modern masters, and their works are extreme from Modernism. And they, also, were attacked by the art -critics, but by an ingenious reversion of their normal tactics... It has generally been assumed that the present-day art -critics were aware of the ignominy that has since been bestowed on their past colleagues who had attacked the Impressionist movement, and that they were not going to be caught out in the same way over the Post-Impres- sionists. That is not the case. Journa- listic art -critics are not constituted to act on an intellectual concept but on an emotional compulsion. They are re- cruited from the ranks of those literary frustrates who have failed to achieve any distinction as writers, so that they must seek to rehabilitate a deboshed self- esteem by resorting to the assassin's knife. In Modernistic Art they found a superb opportunity of wielding it on serious values in art, not by the attack direct, but the attack oblique. With one glad howl of exultation the whole mob of them set out to acclaiin Mordernism as a new evangel in plastic art. And they are still tub-thumping the same stale old theme in an arbitrary jargon invented by the studio buffoons themselves. For my part, I endorse the tactics of the journalistic art -critics. A lie has no existence, and their frenzied effort to affirm non-existent values in art merely exhausts itself in a vacuum. It may muddle a certain section of the public, but that is not the section of the public which has any effect on the cultural energy of a community. That is main- tained by a very small nucleus of sophisticated intellects, and the exchange between creation and perception goes By NORMA calmly on without taking any notice of journalistic splenetics or studio polemics. But in dismissing any significance in the journalistic attack on serious values in art, I, for one artist striving to do something within the gamut of those values, and concerned for the dignity of art itself, refuse to dismiss or condone the dirty work done to our profession by those writers I have already referred to, who are not journalists but prose - writers of distinction, and who have used the status acquired by their works tb depreciate all that makes for distinction in ours. Of those I select Osbert Sitwell and Somerset Maugham, because both are meticulous exponents of literary style. And what literary style is to a writer, the impasto of an oil -painting is to an artist. Precisely what a writer under- stands by a suavity of sequence between N LINDSAY ants, b vowels an a d connoicesn- y balance between the short and the long sentence to achieve lucidity or emphasise a passage, by using the paragraph to pro- long or shorten a period according to its weight of subject-matter, and, most of all, by seeking to find the precise word which will convey the mental, emotional, or visual image the writer wishes to define. All these things an artist seeks to express by the use of thick or thin paint to eliminate unessentials and to focus attention on a salient passage, by con- veying the modulations between shadow and highlight in graduating brushwork from a smooth layer of paint to one where a loaded brush is used, by a gamut of values dictated by the play of light over surfaces and texture, and, most of all, by seeking the precise brush -stroke which will accent a form, finalise a tonal sequence, and convey to the eye the visual impact of a thing seen. Just as exhausted synonyms to find the exact word he needed, Sargent would make repeated brush -strokes in the air before committing to canvas the accent he needed on a form, a texture, or the crescendo of a light-passage. And this problem of the impasto has been the incessant preoccupation of all painters who have achieved mastership in paint from Da Vinci and DUrer, who inaugur- ated the Renaissance, to Orpen and Sargent, who are the latest masters of perfect stylism in the use of oil paint. And that same preoccupation over a plastic use of words has been the major obsession of writers from Jeremy Taylor to Somerset Maugham. I pause at Maugham, because, of all writers save Hazlitt, he has written the most lucid and understanding essays on style that I have read, and because he once studied painting, and does know good painting from bad. On that score Osbert Sitwell can be dismissed. For all his easy and graceful style as a writer, I've never read a word of his that indicates the slightest knowledge of style in paint. From the start he has acclaimed the whole lunatic output of Modernism without any discrimination between one studio clown or another, while he has jeered at Sargent by taking an air of tolerant derision to his painting, and has crudely stigmatised Orpen as a "supreme Irish carpenter and flashlight photo- grapher," for which impertinence future annotators of belles lenses will administer a well -deserved kick-in -the -pants to Osbert, if his personal reminiscences en- dure on the bookshelves-which is doubt- ful. But Maugham is seriously concerned for the dignity of letters, and has returned again and again to an analysis of style in his essays, using as examples all classic precedents of quality in writers, from the translators of the Bible down to Hazlitt. He is certainly reticent over ascribing stylistic virtues to writers of his own era, and in one of his novels makes a slighting reference to Conrad. It is because of his insistence that writers must study classic precedents in good style that his advocacy of Modernist painting becomes so offensive. Take this from his latest series of essays, "The Vagrant Mood": - The 'ensnare of literature... It Is to otold shapelemmess and liteolierenre, natal he founded on, and determined by, lisp standards of the period when English promo Vfiti7:!1. rale::!::".:44:7:17.' of "ah." From which passage I turn to an essay on beauty in plastic art and find he has the immortal rind to write as follows:- Even Greek sculpture, owing to the acquaintance we h.ve now made with Chinese and Negro art, has for artists themselves lied Its appeal. It Is no longer a source of Inspiration. Its hearty Is dying.... We grow tired of something we know too well and usk for lamenting So be damned to you, Mr. Maugham, for a treacherous renegade even to your own creed as a perfectionist in prose, which is to say, perfection also in poetry, music and painting. Allow me to trans- late into your own metier of prose what a Picasso is saying to you in paint. Though there is not much profit to be gained by trying to separate rubbish from rubbish, I made a point of examining the Picasso in the present exhibition carefully, and observed that it was splodged in with oil-color thinned -out to the con- sistency of watercolor by turps, and apparently applied to canvas by a wad of cotton -wool. The imbecility of its subject I pass, but what it was saying to you, Mr. Maugham, was "Gug-gug- gug-bub-bub," which is the nearest I can get to an infant trying to exercise its vocal -chords in the cradle. But enough of discussing these insensate fooleries. I observed that the average expression of the public inspecting them was one of dazed incomprehension, with a variation here and there to derision or a just indignation at a fraud imposed on the optic nerve, while the Gallery attendants looked extremely ashamed of themselves, as being forced officially to sanction a function degrading to their self-respect. For myself, I went forth to quell a slight sensation of nausea by having a look at the splendidly con- trolled brushwork of Ramsay's "Sisters," and to enjoy once again the .taggering achievement of Gruner's "Spring Frosts" and Streeton'a "Fire's On." They were fortunately hanging side-by-side, so that I could turn from the tender welling-up of dawn light to the actinic brilliance of midday sunlight ; Pan's hour. I never saw those two superb works look so lovely, for which, ar.least, I could thank the offence my eyes had been forced to endure in that Modernist in- ferno. Casting memory back over the galleries of Europe, England and America, conviction assured me that those two paintings are among the ',greatest land- scapes this world possess:'l. Before departing I had 4 look -d other Gruners, and if any is 41N. terested enough to study an example of what I have been trying to define of style in an oil impasto as used in Gruner's "Frosty Morning," let him observe how the weighted brushwork in the almost - colorless sky conveys the vibrant effect of pure light, while a certain quivering STORY "Ancestor Washup" By J. B. Blair Terrifying disclosures when a school- boy son begins tracing back his ancestry. One of next week's BULLETIN short stories. use of the brush into a rich impasto suggests the shimmer of frost across the surface of a field. Once again we have the right to ask why the trustees have squandered money on this exhibition of rubbish which merely confuses the public at large, dis- gusts the minority of art-lovers with a cultivated taste in paintings, and pleases only a very small group of art students infected with Modernism, when they have the galleries of Europe and England at their disposal for a loan exhibition of genuine works of art. We had such ex- hibitions in Will Ashton's period as curator of the Gallery, and vastly stimu- lating they were, selected by Ashton's impeccable taste and knowledge of the world's art. I can think only of one excuse for in- flicting this exhibition on the public, and that is to present it as an awful example of the state of moral decadence which reduced Europe to chaos. There is no separating art from life. When a people throw aside all reverence for standards of value which have slowly built up a civilised consciousness in man- kind, it must revert to barbarism. And in spite of itself Modernistic art has given us one irrefutable value in rela- tion to the very values it has sought to destroy. If we accept, say, Rembrandt as the apex of all that is greatest in painting, then Picasso is the nadir of all that is rotten. With the exhibition now on the walls of the Gallery, painting has reached its zero in worthlessness. It cannot get lower.