Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

Peso "TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W J JAN1972 100 modern masterpieces THE Museum of Modern Art, New York, has one of the world's greatest collections. It also knows, better than anyone, how to put an art exhibit- ion together. It is therefore guaranteed that the exhibition of "100 Drawings, from Cezanne to Picasso," opening at Farmer's Blaxland Gallery tomorrow, will be a supreme pleasure. The exhibition comes from the Museum of Modern Art's perman- ent collection, and it is a per- sonal choice made by William S. Lieberman, the Museums Cura- tor of Drawings, from what was available and what could safely be travelled to Japan, New Zea- land and Australia. Safety ruled out pastels, char- coal drawings and collages. The collection is formed on art - historical principles, not on nat- ionalistic feeling, so although the museum is in America, all the 47 artists come from Europe. Until recently American art was not thought to be a significant part of art history. (Though surely the drawings of Arshile Gorky, an American artist, are an impor- tant contribution to surrealism?) The coMection also alms at sup- reme quality. Perhaps that is why recent art is not in the exhibi- tion. The final decisions about just what is of supreme quality io recent art have not yet been made. Or is it that recent art- ists don't make drawings as much as artists once did? The demand for highest quality also accounts for the pressure of certain odd, isolated figures. who are scarcely a part of mainstream art history at all-mainstream art history in the first half of the 20th century being Fauvism. Ex- pressionism, Cubist. yss.,4 igns snit r ( art by d ruisl jtiiorrias ists are present, Leger looking the massive heavyweight that he is, Dali moue flimsy. Drawings by Miro, the greatest surrealist, were unfortunately committed to an- other exhibition. Malevich. Duchamp, Picabia and Van Doesburg stand for various kinds of abstraction. And so on-master after master. What I like best are the works by Cezanne, Matisse and Klee. Cezanne's three watercolors are a figure subject of bathers, an architectural one of a house among trees, and a wail of rocks. These rocks are extraordinary. Rounded knobs well outward: they are held in horizontal strata. A few vertical and diagonal marks may be nothing to do with the rocks, they are probably meant to represent trees or branches. yet they are enough to give stability, structure and permanence to the forms on the sheet of paper which more obviously represent the rock face. Cezanne surely has a lurid fear, or awe, in the presence of the towering rocks-they might shift, or fall, or revert to their fluid, lava state and pour over the spec- tator. The struggle to make art out or formless marks on a sheet of paper is transparently equivalent, for Cezanne, with God's creation of the world. God made order out of chaos, but Cezanne knows that chaos isn't far away: order and stabil- ity are hard to achieve: it is easy to fall back into chaos. One has to Invent ideas of this sort to account for the amazing drama in Cezanne's small water- color. Matisse is a very different kind of artist. He isn't so overawed by the forces of nature. He joins tihem Nobody has ever established such a rhythmic flow, of line in the drawings, of space in the tour bronze heads of Jeannette which are also in the exhibition of "drawings." (If a bronze is small and sketchy, why not treat it as equivalent with a drawing?) Matisse :s forms build up into a floating, dance -like rhythm. You feel his works are from the same order of nature as a tree. It is perhaps no accident that the earliest Matisse drawing in the exhibition is of a woman with a pot of tulips, She and the ',hint intermingle as if they were the same thing. Matisse is as sublime as Cez- anne. If I can't get a.s excited about Picasso, Ws probably my fault. Put it down to a generation gap. The exhibition is perfect, except for its title, "Cezanne through Picasso." If such beautiful works were chosen especially for Austra- lia. perfectionism would also have required a title in Australian Eng- lish (or in English English) in- stead of one in American English. "Cezanne through Picasso" is for us an incomplete phrase, imply- ing through Picasso to something else beyond Picasso. The transla- tion into Australian English is "Cezanne to Picasso."