LondonAuthor(s): Keith RobertsSource: The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 107, No. 749, Western Art in the U. S. S. R. (Aug.,1965), pp. 440-441Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/874629 .

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CURRENT AND FORTHCOMING EXHIBITIONS

sitters from Robert Adair (I7I1-1790),

surgeon, to W. B. Yeats, but there are no illustrations. Potted biographies are de- voted to each sitter. There is no index of artists (relatively unimportant in this case), though some famous ones are re- presented: Nathaniel Hone, James Barry and Roderick O'Connor (all three self portraits), Raeburn, Reynolds, Lawrence, Gilbert Stuart, Watts, Epstein and J. B. Yeats.

Alan Bowness has selected for the Arts Council the first of a series of exhibitions of paintings devoted to 'Decades' - this one, 19i0-20. The show is not coming to London but will be at Glasgow until 29th August, and at Leicester from 7th to 24th September. It opens with the older generation, Steer, Pryde, William Nichol- son, Gwen John, Innes; continues with Camden Town, Bloomsbury and their offshoots; and ends with the Vorticists and the War artists. A most informative little catalogue has been issued. B.N.

London For their summer exhibition, at the New London Gallery, Marlborough's are show- ing recent works by Henry Moore and Francis Bacon. The juxtaposition is inter- esting, and striking - especially so in such cramped quarters - but it is fundament- ally irrelevant. In what matters most, in attitude and temper, and in the impres- sion that their art creates, the artists are totally dissimilar. Even certain formal analogies, such as the blurring and distor- tion of the human frame, turn out to be misleading on closer inspection. In Moore's tiny figures, as much as in the larger pieces - which include the Atom Piece and the three-piece reclining figure recently shown at the Tate in the British Sculpture exhibition - each detail, however frag- mentary in form, has an air of premedita- tion. Whereas Bacon's forms have a swift spontaneity of touch that could only have come from constant adjustments made in the process of painting.

Of greater importance are the d;ffer- ences of spirit. The new works by Moore are in themselves as emotionally non- committal as ever. They have the formal restraint, the dignity and - in the best sense of the word - the emptiness of Greek art. There could be no greater contrast between these figures, with their detach- ment and innocence, and Mr Bacon's two recent triptychs in the adjacent rooms (see Figs.6o, 62). The format and design are of the by now familiar kind. To each panel the artist allots a figure (occasion- ally two, with the second given a subordi- nate role), which he places in an oppres- sively empty room. With their suggestions of blood and torment and sexual aberra- tion, the triptychs, the series of distorted heads (actually 'portrait studies') and the picture, after Muybridge, of a woman emptying a bowl of water and a paralytic child on all fours, create an impression of nameless horror, from which one in- stinctively recoils. And so one would if the

artist were not so great a master of his craft, if his colouring were not so brilliant, or his powers of design so telling. The quality remains as high as ever. One may dislike Mr Bacon's work because one cannot dismiss it, but one cannot dismiss it because one does not like it.

Unlike Henry Moore, he is an expres- sionist. And whereas the sculptor's work (especially the small seated figures in the exhibition) harks back to the simple, natural condition of things, Mr Bacon's paintings constantly suggest a sophisti- cated, decadent, urban environment. There is a satanic quality, which Baudelaire would have appreciated, in his imagery, in the ape-like man squatting on the lava- tory, and in the sense of pain which the blurred, spattered and contorted figures so powerfully evoke.

At the Tate Gallery, until the end of the month, there is a large, sumptuously catalogued exhibition of sculpture, paint- ings and drawings by the 63-year-old Alberto Giacometti. The display, super- vised by the artist, is uncluttered, even at times over spacious - not entirely sur- prising, perhaps, with forms so thin in rooms so large.

The general effect is impressive, though somewhat monotonous, as is so often the case when modern artists with highly individual styles are shown in bulk. The exhibition opens with a head of 1914 but it is with work from the mid I920's that it really gets under way. Particularly inter- esting here are the bronze heads of the artist's parents. With their Cubist forms, and distortion of traditional concepts of perspective and anatomical proportions, and in their suggestion of a hieratic totem, they already reveal the two most saliant characteristics of Giacometti's mature work. Before achieving his famous attenua- ted style, however, he had to pass through a longish, and on the whole rather dull Surrealist phase.

The bulk of the exhibition consists of works done since 1945, in the elongated manner, for the expression of which Gia- cometti would seem to find sculpture and painting equally compelling alternatives. The same preoccupations are common to both: the concentration on the head, which is often treated in detail, at the expense of a summarily suggested body, and the same distortions of the body. In many of the paintings, it seems to advance and recede, like an image in a fairground mirror (Parmigianino used the same principle in the Vienna Self Portrait). In the sculpture it is stretched and stretched, stiffly. One thinks of some Egyptian Alice out of a twelfth-dynasty Wonderland.

Some of Signor Giacometti's effects work supremely well. In particular, the busts - especially of his brother, Diego (Fig.59) - where the profile view, which implies a fully rounded head, is in direct contrast to the frontal view, which reveals an entirely flattened face - like a cartoon cat temporarily squashed by a mouse- operated boulder. The effect is frighten-

ing. It is as if one were watching someone's head being slowly distorted in front of one's very eyes. In general, though, Gia- cometti emerges, at the Tate at least, as a somewhat disappointing artist. Too often the figures look mannered. When they are small, they seem trivial, like table orna- ments, and when they are large - some go to 9 ft - they have a way of looking much too big. And there is something glib about the whole proposition, about the precise combination of the carefully un- finished bodies and the frontalised Egyp- tian poses. But some of the busts, notably those of his wife, Annette (Fig.6I), are very beautiful; and almost all the paintings are elegant, and pleasingly subdued in tone.

At Wildenstein's, an exhibition of the Australian Impressionist, John Peter Russell (1858-1930). Like Roderick O'Connor, Russell was one of those people with lots of personality and vitality who put all their individuality into their life. Although talented, he produced hardly anything that did not reflect, detrimental- ly, the work of the great contemporaries he knew in France. He was friendly with Van Gogh and painted his portrait - a strong, Couture-ish affair done about 1886. Russell was on even more friendly terms with Monet, who was to prove the greatest and most lasting inspiration. The results are certainly very attractive, and easy on the eye, but only really interesting in context, the more so in that Russell himself was a picturesque figure with money and plenty of character.

The Lefevre Summer Show is an antho- logy of pictures mainly by house artists. It is certainly worth a look, if only for the very good Ann Redpath Pink Goblet, which has the most beautiful colour, with stabs of brilliant ultramarine and dark, dark red. There are also some good Lowrys and characteristic Burras, and several clever, metallic and expensive works by Buffet.

At Tooth's, recent gouaches by Sam Francis. Much influenced by Kandinsky, Mr Francis favours splodges of colour linked by casual tracers of pigment that splutter, intermittently, across the inter- vening areas of the white paper. The gouaches are extremely bright (primary colours are the order of the day) and attractive; and best when small in scale. In the larger works, a lack of firmness in the design is detrimental.

KEITH ROBERTS

Paul Huet at Rouen This summer, ending I5th September, the Musde des Beaux-Arts of Rouen is pre- senting a large exhibition of works by the French landscape artist Paul Huet (1803- 1869).1 Mademoiselle Popovitch, the mu- seum curator, with the assistance of M. Pierre Miquel, a devoted amateur of Huet,2 has carefully selected and arranged 1 Musde des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, Paul Huet [19651], 69 pp. 2 M. Miquel has published a monograph entitled Paul Huet, Sceaux, Edit ,s de la Martinelle [1962].

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1955. Painted bronze; height, 56 5 cm. (Collection Miss Erica Brausen, London; exh. Tate Gallery.)

60o. Seated Woman on Curved Block, by Henry Moore. 1957. Bronze; height, 20 cm. (Exh. Marlborough Fine Art Ltd, London.)

61. Annette IV, by Alberto Gia- cometti. 1962. Plaster; height, 59'5 cm. (Artist's Collection; exh. Tate Gallery.)

62. Crucifixion-Triptych, by Francis Bacon. 1965. Canvas, left and centre panel 198 by 147 cm; right panel 198 by 147'5 cm. (Exh. Marlborough Fine Art Ltd, London.)

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