Art Battleground In Venice

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31109, 12 July 1966, Page 12

Art Battleground In Venice

The Venice Biennale is a battle ground for artistic prizes, writes the art critic of “The Times.” It probably would not appear so to anyone visiting the show now but the artists and middlemen of art who crowded the pavilions and cafes last month were nearly all somehow or other involved in the struggles and decisions —even intrigues—behind the works of art exhibited and the prizes awarded.

The Biennale is no detached survey of contemporary art Sometimes it seems to be conducted more like a presidential campaign. But the fact remains that the thirty-third Biennale is a good one and in some ways an important one. Perhaps for the first time no one country dominates; instead one is left with the impression of a handful of exceptional individuals, from widely different parts of the world, their work showing striking similarities, though their means of expression may be very different. An international language breaks through the nationalist methods of presentation. The disappointing thing is that the prizes do not reflect this spirit, nor what one gathered of the enthusiasms of the visitors to the exhibition. MAIN PRIZE

The main painting prize, won last time by Rauschenberg, went to the Argentinian Le Parc, whose exhibition was a maze of lights and mirrors and games like distorting spectacles and cast iron shoes to upset the spectator’s stability. It is full of ideas, but in no sense an artistic language; it palls, for example, beside the absolutely modern and mature work of the Venezuelan Soto or the American, Ellsworth Kelly. The main sculpture prize was divided between the French artist, Etienne Martin, and Robert Jacobsen, a veteran Norwegian who has

long worked honestly and rather heavily in the Gonzalez tradition of welded steel. The German, Gunter Haese, and Anthony Caro won smaller prizes. For the average visitor the tensions surrounding the prizes are only reflected in the sober notices which appear on the opening day in the prize-winning rooms. Much more striking in the long run is a new kind of interaction between the work and the space around it, and between the work and the spectator. SIMPLIFICATION Ellsworth Kelly, for example, has simplified his colour into single great dazzling fields which are bounded often only by the curved edge of the canvas. When one enters it the whole room seems to be buoyed up by colour.

Soto’s room contains only five of his delicate vibrating surfaces, but they are all majestic in scale. The fact that he has worked on this scale and specially for the space given him makes this a new revelation, even for those who know his work. The same goes for Camargo, who has extended his white reliefs of cylindrical elements into two monumental towers glowing with light in the open air.

Fontana has shown courage in limiting himself to just four neatly incised white canvases and creating a kind of white sepulchre for them. This year the English pavilion shares something of this same spirit of openness; it makes a much clearer statement, certainly, than it did last time, and Anthony Caro’s “Early One Morning” looks fine in the entrance.

This is to pick a handful of artists out of hundreds, but the quality is as always incredibly uneven. It is, of course, accentuated by what is probably the Biennale’s most useful quality—it enables one to compare works and styles directly.