ART WITHOUT REALITY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 364, 14 June 1946, Page 6

ART WITHOUT REALITY

(A Review of the Academy Exhibition,

written tor "The Listener’ by

HOWARD W

ADMAN

ing what appeals to them, or an academy for hanging what is sent in to it. But when the painting and the hanging is concerned almost exclusively with one type of subject painted in one kind of way, your interest is inclined to flag. Of the 133 paintings in the autumn exhibition of the New Zealand Academy, 104 are landscapes, seascapes or flower pieces, And the: reason, it is only too clear, is that these subjects sell better than any others. i | OBODY can blame artists for paintIt is desirable that paintings should sell, but when works of art are produced of a type and style that is dictated by sales possibilities, then such work is Commercial Art. And then it is time to ask-Is the Academy merely a shop in which painters offer their wares? Is it a shop governed by the first law of merchandisingthat the customer is always right-or is it a place where the explorers of consciousness and mediators of reality present their findings, to our general stimulation and increase in understanding? A rhetorical question, for no academy has ever been that. Academies are cursed with official status, with patronage, with the necessity of selling to those who want confirmation and

not apocalypse. For the last century, at any rate, those who had anything to say have said it in holes and corners. * * * HERE is no point in belabouring the Academy for being academic, but, on the other hand, neither is there sense in pretending that its present standards are good and healthy when they are not. Those glossy lines of smiling landscapes where every, prospect pleases are not as boring as hell, they are worse-as boring as the conventional idea of heaven. I take the view that every work of art should be a revelation, small or large, and we have no right to expect revelation to be pretty. In fact, from John on Patmos to Picasso in Paris, apocalypse has tended to be disturbing and strange. You may or may not feel that life is so unpleasant as to deserve M. Picasso’s hysterical derision, but neither is the world the sugar-plum fairy that most of our New Zealand painters pretend to believe it is. You may well ask what it is that works of art should reveal. The answer to that would take us far into the sticky mess that is Aesthetics. At its highest, the function of painting has been defined

by a Chinese painter of the tenth century in a recorded conversation that goes like this: Questioner: "Painting is to make beautiful things, and the important thing is to obtain their true likeness; is that not right?" The painter answers: "It is not . . . Painting is to paint, from the shapes of things to estimate their meaning, from the beauty of things to reach their inner significance, from the reality of things to grasp the meaning of all things. You should not confuse outward beauty with reality." % * * "THERE you have it in-a nutshell. But that is a tall order and we had better fall back on the lesser, but still very moving revelations — the interplay of essential form with changing outward conditions, the structure of rock and root and bone beneath the surface of land and flesh, the intricate, endless pattern of shapes in light. And if that is too much to ask for, then surely at the very least we can demand that our painters reveal something of the substance and quality of New Zealand life. According to our Academy these islands are a depopulated expanse of scenery in which noth‘ing ever happens. But New Zealanders climb in the mountains, picnic in the bush, bathe in the sea, listen to music, go to the races, milk their cows and shear their sheep, take their babies to the Plunket rooms, sail on the Waitemata, pick apricots at Roxburgh, fish at Russell, stew at Rotorua, get baptised, capped, married, and cremated. Do you mean to tell me that in all this fun there is no material for painting? If there were a popular art rooted in our common life, and thus revealing it to us, we should see and enjoy many things that we now take for granted.

Eo Ba ue O, the Academy will not do. In this show there are interesting experiments in technique by S. B. Maclennan and Russell Clark, there is the highly cultivated vision of T. A. McCormack, there is the impressionist virtuosity of S. L. Thompson, and when you have said that you have said nearly all. The engravers, of course, are in a class by themselves, doing excellent work which should eventually prove of great service in the making of good New Zealand books. The group of unshackled, thinking painters is so small that, when. they stay away in a bunch, the gap is painfully noticeable. Where are Evelyn Page, Lois White, Margaret Thompson? Where, above all, are John Weeks, A. J. C. Fisher, Eric Lee Johnson? We cannot afford to miss any one of them, and yet I know some of these outstanding artists no longer submit to the Academy because they have been met with such lack of understanding in the past. Meanwhile, the paintings on show are selling merrily away, including, I was glad and surprised to see, a delightful work by Mr. Maclennan, The Customer is sometimes right.