Wieneke Archive Book 4d : Artists - Australian & Other Presscuttings

10-THE AUSTRALIAN Monday February 23 1976 Arts Australian JOHN CONSTABLE is the painter Britons love best and his art is a boon to their illustrated biscuit - tin industry. But the nation is troubled. it is still not sure, in this bicentenary of his birth, that the man and his work deserve this affection, and so at the Tate Gallery in London there is a great gath- ering of the academicians, the theorists, critics, dilettantes and all the others who have visited such unease upon the simple faithful. They have a unique opportunity to pore over the evidence, for the gallery has used its greet reputation and skill to collect more than 300 of his oils, watercolors and sketches into an unrepeatedly comprehen- sive exhibition. It traces a Journey from his first known piece, a watercolor and pencil drawing of a girl and dog in landscape, made in 1830 when the artist was 13, to Arundel Mill and Castle, an oil not quite finished when he died in 1837, and a death mask. Reproduced in the catalogue are some of the gallons of petrified prussic that contemporary critics smeared over his work. Constable, the middle-class painter of beauteous landscapes, was a man who r,arned for tame, respect and fortune. But he could not force himself to ex- change style for popularity and retreated into sarcasm to become a caustic -mouthed English gentleman of pain tar more often than pleasure, and almost never of leisure. He once told himself in a private memo: "That I ant not liked, I can easily believe." It added: "My art flatters nobody by imitation, it courts nobody by smooth- ness, It tickles nobody by petiteness, It is without either fat-de-lel or fiddle-de-dee, how then can I hope to be popular?" The Tate considers this exhibition as exploratory, not difinitive, for, despite all his fame today, less than halt of Consta- ble's displays at the Royal Academy and other institutions have so far been iden- tified. The bicentenary that opened in London on Wednesday was devised by the deputy keeper of the British collection at the Tate, Leslie Parris, a leading Consta- ble scholar, Ian Fleming -Williams, and the head of the Art History Department at the Camberwell School of Art and Crafts, Conal Shields. Mr Parris says: "It should not be sim- ply a bicentenary tribute to a great artist but also an opportunity to reassess his mirk in the light of current scholarship." For that sort of reason his course is plot- ted chronologically, separating within that fiamework the exhibited (they are hung on walls painted loganberry) from the rest (warm grey). You follow a trail of block arrows past a host of security and information officers to the works that are on trial for those who would reduce the exploratory to the definitive, and simply on show for those who Just prefer to look. It Is possible to see a small, neat and well-kept cottage painted in his youth, age and wither over years as he returned to same spot to recapture a scene: Mounted on the left-hand wall of one of the narrow galleries that bear the pictures is his completed masterpiece The Hay - Wain and on the right a duller but still greatly detailed version of the same. The experience Is repeated with many other works. Constable frequently gave his compo- sitions a row lease of life by repeating them, often closely but sometimes as dis- tant variants. For a man who sold his first JOHN CONSTABLE'S painting Salisbury Lathed rot from the Bishop's Grounds. Right, Self-portmi Constable county MAX HOLLINGSWORTH in London reports .on the Britons' great uneas, Constable really deserve their affection? picture to a stranger at the age of 37, he habitually annoyed what patrons he had by trying to get back and rework a picture he had altuady sold. Just as Constable's reputation (he is "loved") lags behind that other great British painter J. M. W. Turner (he is "genius") so follow their bicentenar:t3s. A similar Turner exhibition brought out vast crowds and the Tate is to open on Sun- days for the first time to handle the masses expected for Constable. The men (both widely regarded to be eccentric) shared a rivalry too bitter to amuse either of them. Art politicians and chroniclers of the time revelled In it, regaling each other with tales like the terrible prelude to the Royal Academy ex- hibition of 1832. Constable had chosen his boldly -colored Waterloo Bridge f r om Whitehall Stairs, depicting the bridge's opening ceremony in 1017 as all pomp and stark skies and flag-bearing, decorated city barges. Opposite hung Helvoetsluys, one of Turner's beautiful, quietly colored sea pieces. Three days before the opening, Consta- ble stood before his picture adding lashings of extra vermilion and blue. Turner glanced from Waterloo Bridge to his own pictUre, withdrew briefly, then re- turned with a large blob of red lead on his brush which he threw into the middle of his grey sea and left. It made the effects in Waterloo Bridge look silly. A few momenta later Constable looked around at Helvoetsluys and said: "He has been in here and shot it." The blob sat there, mocking Its rival for two days until, in the lest minutes al- lowed for painting, Turner came back and transformed It Into a neat, apt Maw. The unrelenting stance of some critics Is enshrined nowhere better than in The Times reaction in 1831 to the appearance of Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, now one of his most popular pieces. Bor- rowing some of the man's own sarcasm, the paper said . . . "a very vigorous and masterly landscape which somebody has spoiled since It was painted by putting in such clouds as no human being ever saw, and by spotting the foreground all over with whitewash. It is quite impossible that this offence can have been committed with the consent of the artist . Constable, the son of n nrospereits corn -merchant and farmer, was boo, in 1778 at Eastbergholt not far from the banks of the Stour in Suffolk and the im- mediate area remained his domain throughout his life. While Turner set off to wonder at and record France and Italy, Constable refused to leave England ever, even when the French granted him a kind of honor and recognition that he was never allowed at home. According in his first biographer anti friend C. R. Leslie, "Ills nature was pe- culiarly social and could not feel satisfied with scenery, however grand in itself nix did not abound in human assoiatior,, If required villages, churches, farm hou. and cottages - and I believe it wits as much from natural temperament as (ruin early impressions. that his first love, m landscape, was also his latest love." It threatened to become an obsession for not only did he paint constantly in Constable country but he painted it at the same time of day in the same season. Said John Fisher, his greatest friend: "People are tired of mutton on top, mutton at bottom, mutton at the side dishes." Constable broadened his range of silo- jects but remained less than popular. Ho MUSIC MARIA PRERAUER Life, fire and the old prom spirit WEEKEND music varied " from the near -sub- limity of the Sydney String Quartet at a dis gracefully under -populat- ed 60th anniversary con- cert of the NSW Con- servatorium on Friday, to the quirkily ridiculous - the Australian navy (!) fighting Napoleon at the Battle of Borondino with a single cannon and the band of HMAS Penguin, at the last night of the Prom concerts at the Sydney Town flail on Saturday. But bliss first, Following the Sydney String Quartet's swift upward climb toward the summit of chamber music - making is the sort of thing that renders a critic's life worthwhile. Every concert now starts from a rung further up at a higher base camp. Life, fire, passion, color leap out of every work they touch, be it Bartok's No 5, Mozart's H575 major or Heulthortr's No O. Their Bartok especially was brilliant, from its shattering rhythmic intensity to its rich lyricism, establishing such rapt communication with the audi- ence that when the ironic barrel -organ theme broke into the last movement, shocked gasps echoed right around the hall. And the ensemble was scarcely less impressive in the completely different stylistic sonic territory of the Mozart, where Nathan Waks' cello shone without overshadowing. Even our own Peter Sculth- orpe's atm° mherie new work ssiucwhat ru writion, Per - myth. The oft -repeated one that polished renditions are hot possible, sometimes not even aimed for, within this series. That lack of rehearsal time can only allow for a quick hit-and-miss turnover. Because suddenly this Prom offered something more than a lick and a promise. It Proved that in the right hands even good performances are Possible here too. It could be a hard act to follow. ROCK. COLIN TALBOT tours around the because he has a rt pathos around him not that lie isn't I I that he has :itinit.11 back from the slur, cy of the Coin, to like a friendly coml. up in Yorkshire. Ki laugh TM are alms'' a lost Minimum Laughing with membrance, It's a recent Barry edge. The show lakes p1 intervals between used to call "folk from one called f. Homy, who Isn't had as Innfren,Ive