NEW ENTHUSIASM FOR THE ARTS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 468, 11 June 1948, Page 16

NEW ENTHUSIASM FOR THE ARTS

Londoners Queue-up at the Galleries

An interview with JAMES BOSWELL, formerly of Auckland and now Art Editor of "Lilliput" Magazine, written for "The Listener’ by

A. R. D.

FAIRBURN

HEN James Boswell left New Zealand in 1925 to study at the Royal College of Art in London, he had no longterm plans for the future, The decision whether he was to stay in England or return home later was left for circumstances to determine; and in their subtle and inexorable way they have made the decision for him over the intervening twenty-three years.- Today he is the art editor of Lilliputhaving recently resigned the job of managing the Shell Company’s big studioand it seems less likely than ever that he will settle in New Zealand again. Last week he arrived by air for a fortnight’s visit, and saw New Zealand for the first time for nearly a quarter of a century. He felt at something of a loss. For the first day or two he found himself stepping out from the pavement to hail a Hampstead bus, or meeting a bit of himself he had known long ago and had forgotten about. I got together with him, and spent a couple of hours piecing together dates and places, asking him questions, and generally playing Boswell to Boswell’s Johnson, "Surprisingly little change" was his judgment en Auckland after three days, during which time the weather had done its best-to destroy memories of the halcyon summers of early youth. But he had not seen the new Government housing suburbs, or been up the East Coast from Takapuna to Brown’s Bay, or climbed Mt. Eden and looked around. * * a OSWELL has painted a great deal dur_ing the past two decades. He has exhibited at the Royal Academy, with the London Group, and in the exhibitions of the Artists’ International Association. He is one of the leading figures in the Society of Industrial Artists, of which he has the honour of being a Fellow. The Society, which is more like a guild than a trade union, has become very powerful during the past few years, and has done a great deal to improve the position of artists who work for indus-try-designers of pottery, poster-paint-ers, illustrators, and so on. It has a select membership of something over 400 of the leading industrial artists. For five years during the war period Boswell served with the Forces, first with the R.A.M.C. in Sicily, Iraq and elsewhere, and then for a year at the War Office in the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, editing the "Current Affairs Bulletin." While he was in the Middle East he did many war drawings, some of which were bought later by the War Artists Advisory Committee. His book, The Artist's Dilemma, has just been published in London, and has attracted a good deal of attention. % % * ""T‘HERE’S an amazing enthusiasm for the arts in Britain at the present time," Boswell told me. "I went down to the Tate Gallery at ten o’clock on a rainy morning to see the Van Gogh show, and there was a queue of 500 people waiting to get in. The big exhibi-

LE LS iL a TD 5 tions in London to-day draw something like 100,000 people during the course of a month, The Picasso Exhibition was crowded all the time, with long queues." "What about the general run of contemporary painters," I asked. "Are they better off than they were?" "Most of them find it hard nowadays to get enough stuff together to have a show. They sell their pictures as fast as they paint them." ‘Is that because the public has fallen in love with art, or ... ?" "Partly because if you’ve got spare money to-day there’s not much else to spend it on. But I think there’s more than that in it. Some sort of general awakening has taken place. Art seems to be ‘on the map’ for the first time in ages, People get quite worked up about it-and that surely means that they think it’s important. "For instance, the National Gallery pictures were stored in a Welsh slatemine during fhe war, and the trustees took the opportunity of having a lot of the Dutch, Flemish and Italian paintings cleaned up. They didn’t say much about this. But when the paintings were hung again after the war people were saying, ‘Aren’t. they lovely? I. hadn't noticed before how beautiful they are!’ Then it began to be realised what had happened, and a public controversy broke out, Old gentlemen wrote to the newspapers complaining that the pictures had been ‘ruined,’ with all their nice golden-brown colour taken away. Of course, the younger painters were delighted. There’s been a long correspondence in The Times about it." "And what’s your own view?": "I’m astonished at the results of the clean-up. For instance, they’ve disinterred Constable’s Cornfield from its layers of varnish-and you can understand now why it rocked the boat when it was first shown. It’s more or less in its original state now, and it’s as fresh and lively as a spring day. The landscape glitters, with the suggestion of newfallen rain. Beautiful. It’s the same with the Rubens ‘paintings. It’s quite evident now that Rubens was a great colourist, And so with all the other paintings they’ve cleaned up. It was hard to see what was going on in these pictures, behind all the clouds of thick varnish. But now the colours are as vivid as the painters meant them to be. And all sorts of things have appeared-birds in the undergrowth, and rabbits, and so forth. A lot of unsuspected things have come to light in the background of Rembrandt’s Woman Taken in Adultery. _ "The National Gallery trustees haven’t budged in their defence of the clean-up. They’re taking the thing very

seriously. They’ve put on a show of the paintings, with photographs of them in their previous state, and X-ray photographs. There are cleaned, uncleaned, and partly-cleaned paintings showing together, just to let people see the contrast. Some of the older artists don't like what’s been done. I suppose they’re so used to seeing the paintings as they were," "And what about the general public?" "I don’t think there’s any doubt about their attitude. They’re delighted. If you could see the crowds in the National Gallery you’d svon realise it. There are regular lectures, and you see people turning up with camp-stools and bundles of sandwiches. The Gallery is a much brighter and gayer place than it used to .be. The thick coats of varnish have been making a mystery of these pictures for years past. The artists sometimes glazed the surfaces of their paintings, but ‘they certainly didn’t mean them to be looked at through a thick yellow fog." a mt * "(COMING back to contemporary painters," I said, "what sort of prices are they getting for their work?" "If they're any good at ajl they have little or no difficulty in selling pictures. A young painter will get, say, from 25 to 40 guineas for a medium-sized» dil. Well-established modern painters get from 70 to 250 guineas. And, of course, the leading Academicians collect more than that-sometimes up to 1,000 guineas. A first-class modern painter such as Matthew Smith will sell a picture for 250 to 300 guineas." "Who buys the Academy paintings at such prices?" I asked. "For example, those pictures of racehorses that get shown year after: year?" "Well," said Boswell with a smile, "wealthy bookmakers haven’t much else to spend their money on, you know." "Are there any really good young painters coming on in England?" "There’s one who is, I think, outstand-ing-Adrian Ryan, who is 27. On the work he’s done, he should go very far indeed. Of course, there’s a fairly big group of youngish painters whose reputations are firmly established-Moore, Sutherland, Piper, Colquhoun, Francis Bacon, Keith Vaughan, Michael Ayrton and John Linton, for instance. There’s a great deal of fine work being done in

England at the present time. There’s been a remarkable revival of the English tradition. Twenty years ago we were completely avershadowed by the French. Not so now. It’s very heartening." * * * WALKED round the Auckland Society "of Arts current exhibition with Boswell, and afterwards pressed him to tell me what he thought of New Zealand painting. "I wouldn’t dream of saying anything about New Zealand painting in general without seeing a lot more of it," he said, "but if you want my first impressions of this show. . . . Well, there are a lot of things that are painted quite skilfully and intelligently. But one thing that strikes me is the very sombre colour of nearly all the paintings. It seems to me that in most cases the artists have just set out to copy the colour of the landscape, or whatever the subject may be. The best painters in all ages have never copied colour. Good painters organise colour-and that means, to quite an extent, inventing it, or imagining it. Whether it’s Rubens or Constable or Picasso, the same thing holds good. Art isn’t just an imitation of nature-it transcends nature, and becomes a thing in itself. That idea must be grasped hold of very firmly-that a painting is a thing, existing in its own right, and not just a representation of something else. The ‘subject’ of the picture isn’t completely unimportant, but it provides only the starting-point, or a sort of ‘springboard,’ for the artist. It’s what the artist does to the

subject, in terms of design, rhythm, texture and colour-organisation that really matters. Art must be more than just a plagiarising of nature. It’s an activity of the imagination." Boswell pointed to. a water-colour drawing of some back-street houses by Elise Mourant. "That’s one sort of thing New Zealand artists might devote more attention to," he remarked. "There’s a stronger emphasis there, of course, on the subject itself. There’s any amount of local material here in. Auckland-old houses, and so on-that is a necessary part of any sort of New Zealand tradition. Both the architect and the painter should be interested in recording these things-and they’ll have to move fairly fast, because these buildings will be pulled down soon or later. All the things that New Zealanders have made or built in the past are essential to the realisation of a New Zealand tradition. There’s room for a great deal of documentary painting, I think. I suppose it’s hard for local people go objectify their environment, and realise its importance as history, and to see its unique qualities. It’s easier for me, coming back and looking at all this stuff afresh. Perhaps you ‘don’t realise that there are things about Auckland architecture that are not found anywhere else. They’re not all necessarily good, from a purely aesthetic point of view, but they’re all significant. In Australia they’ve woken up to this. There are some enthusiastic painters and photographers working on documentary records of Australia’s past-anqd I’q like to see the same thing get under ead here in New Zealand."