Art: Anything Can Happen

Austin Cooper is a tweedy, grey-bearded Londoner of 59 who made his name as a poster designer. “But during the war,” says Cooper, “my interest in posters faded. I found my hands were functioning without any volition. The first results were doodles, then automatic writing. I thought ‘If my pen is doing this, why not the brushes?’ One day my hand shot out. Much to my astonishment it picked up a brush and drew on a board.”

Little did Cooper know what he was in for. The need to paint nothing in a know-nothing way grew on him day by day. He began getting up at 5 a.m. to start “work” on his pictures (abstractions done in watercolor, brown ink and pasted scraps of paper). To keep his art “automatic,” he read the Book of Psalms while his hands did what they pleased. He became a vegetarian (“I don’t think I could have worked so long on roast beef”) and, what was more important, he found a dealer. Cooper’s labors, on exhibition in a London gallery last week, inspired a certain amount of automatic writing on the part of British critics. “It may perhaps be taken as a guarantee of … authenticity,” the London Times opined, “. . . that his pictures are extraordinarily minute and precise in execution; they resemble nothing so much as patches of an old wall on which successive layers of wallpaper have mouldered away. . .”

In a serene little catalogue note of his own, Artist Cooper said he could be of scant help to the critics: “The unconscious painter is himself only a spectator of the work he produces.” But, said Cooper, he could explain why he had signed and dated his work on the back instead of the front: “The pictures may be hung in any of four ways.”