Art: Damned Nonsense

For the first time in ten years, Britain’s Royal Academy held a banquet last week to celebrate the opening of its annual summer show, and broadcast the traditionally stately doings over BBC. Amid the clinking of port glasses and the deep, decorous buzz of voices, radio listeners heard the sonorous accents of the toastmaster calling upon His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury and others for appropriate little speeches. At last, R.A. President Sir Alfred Munnings rose to speak, and almost broke up the party.

Red-faced Sir Alfred, 70, had made his reputation as an able painter of fine horseflesh. More recently, he had been worsted by Tate Gallery Director John Rothen stein in a public test of the Academy’s taste in art collecting (TIME, March 14] and announced his decision to retire nex year. But Horse Painter Munnings was still feeling his oats; he made the R.A. dinner an occasion to register his emphatic nay to modern art.

“If you want to paint a tree,” he cried, “for heaven’s sake make it look like a tree! . . . Now, you go to the Tate, and there in a room on the right you’ll see a picture by Matisse called La Forêt!”

But before he got around to blasting the offending Forest, some of Sir Alfred’s less conservative colleagues stopped squirming and started shouting. From the back of the room came cries of “That’s beautiful!” and “Lovely work!” Munnings turned a shade redder, sputtered: “I hear other members interrupting me … I am president and I have the right to speak. I shall not be here next year, thank God!”

For support, Munnings turned to Honorary Academician Extraordinary Winston Churchill, who sat with him at the speakers’ table. “Not long ago,” he recalled, “Mr. Churchill and I were walking together. Mr. Churchill said to me, ‘Alfred, if we saw Picasso coming down this street towards us, would you join me in kicking hard a certain part of him?’ I said, ‘By God, Winston, I would!'”

When Sir Alfred was safely seated, Amateur Painter Churchill, whom everyone had expected to be the big gun of the evening, rose to his feet. “No one can doubt,” he said in a restrained voice, “that our president holds—er—strong views. But it is fitting that a president of the Royal Academy should have a properly pronounced opinion quite rightly corrected by his colleagues.”

In the course of the night, 40 BBC listeners protested Sir Alfred’s “damns,” and another 14 sent congratulations on his forthrightness. Said Sir Alfred in the morning: “I apologized to the archbishop last night, but I repeat, it [modern art] is all a lot of damned nonsense.”