Art: British Revival

Not in decades have Manhattan muse um-and gallery-goers witnessed such a heaping helping of British art as is spread out before them this season. The main course, in the Manhattan Museum of Modern Art’s “Masters of British Paint ing” show, is a 150-year survey of 31 artists (see color pages), ranging from the visions of William Blake to the hallucinatory portraits of Francis Bacon, from the landscapes of Turner and Constable to the cool, elegant abstractions of Ben Nicholson and Stanley Spencer’s portrayal of a New Jerusalem near his green and pleasant home town of Cookham (TIME. Nov. 21).

Backing up the Modern’s show, later to move on to St. Louis and San Francisco, is an exhibit of twelve contemporary British painters and sculptors rounded up by

Manhattan’s E. and A. Silberman Gal leries, slated for round-the-country museum showings, and a whole parade of one-man and group shows in the galleries. Says Manhattan Gallery Owner Catherine Viviano: “There are great things coming out of England, more exciting and more alive than have been seen in years.”

Four for One. Behind the upsurge of interest in British painting is the impressive British performance in recent major international exhibitions. Side by side with the painters is a whole new group of promising sculptors, e.g., Venice Prizewinner Lynn Chadwick. who have followed the pioneering of Britain’s one unquestioned artist of world stature, Henry Moore.

As a result, the British revival, which has spread back to 19th century painting and produced a record $56,000 for a Turner seascape and $30,000 for a Constable in a Manhattan auction last month, has once again made contemporary British art a much-sought-after prize. Manhattan’s Galerie Chalette. currently showing eleven British sculptors, has to date sold 19 pieces. Another Manhattan art dealer, who has already plunged heavily in British painting, confidently predicts: “An investment of $100,000 today in good British art will bring $400,000 in four years.”

Tricks of Light. The birthright of British artists, as their Manhattan showing makes clear, is a love of portraiture and landscape. In the 18th century, Hogarth not only set down with unerring eye the look of crowded London coffeehouses, but portrayed the dissolute Englishman of his day with a skill and fervor far beyond mere pamphleteering and caricature. The talent Gainsborough showed for catching the majesty of England’s landscape became Britain’s prime contribution to painting in the hands of his successors: John Constable, who lavished the same care on cloud formations that Italian Renaissance masters gave the nude, and Joseph Mallord William Turner, who analyzed the tricks of light and atmosphere to produce a new, revolutionary art a whole generation ahead of the French impressionists.

Among the modern followers of that tradition, Welsh-born Augustus John gives his portraits of the great a romantic dash and bravura air that raises them far above the cliche level of most Royal Academy official portraits. Dublin-born Francis Bacon with his eerie studies has introduced into portraiture the element of overpowering psychological shock that leaves an echo in the mind like a scream in an empty corridor, and has made Bacon one of the best and most individual artists in Britain today.

Hadrian’s Wall. Today an invisible Hadrian’s wall still divides British art into a realm of excitable, Celtic imagination that runs from Blake to Bacon on one side and a John Bull love of country, landscape and solid realities concretely rendered on the other. The impact of surrealism unleashed for the late Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland, both admirers of Blake, a freedom of fancy that has led them to the essence and mystery behind the English landscape, just as it inspired Sculptor Moore in his early bone and stone metamorphoses.

Painter Sutherland has also jumped over the wall toward realism in his portraits, including his controversial Winston Churchill (TIME, Dec. 13, 1954). An even more direct approach, inspired by the drab realities of postwar Britain, is the young, vigorous “Kitchen Sink” school with painters such as Jack Smith, 28, and Edward Middleditch, 33, taking for their subjects the groceries on a kitchen table, teapots, stoves and even the w.c.

But like their contemporaries elsewhere, most of the younger British painters seem determined to buck all tradition. Veering off on new courses of their own, they plainly show the influence of U.S. abstract expressionists, rated by British critics as a visual equivalent of rock ‘n’ roll. Prime example is Painter William Scott, 43, now having his first one-man show in Manhattan at the Martha Jackson Gallery. Scott’s ominous saucepans owe something to the slick stick school of France’s Bernard Buffet (TIME, Feb. 27), just as his segmented, all-red nudes do to Jean Dubuffet’s art brut. But placed alongside Manhattan’s avant-garde painting they look right at home.

An even more dramatic example of widening U.S. impact is bearded, Scottish-born Alan Davie, 35. His discovery of Jackson Pollock in 1948 came as a revelation: “I was amazed to find that I wasn’t alone.” Davie’s recent Manhattan show of his free-form, Druidical abstractions was a near sellout, with eight large paintings snapped up by museums and collectors. Davie’s sales in six previous London shows: none.