Culture and the Consolidated Rate

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 489, 5 November 1948, Page 8

Culture and the Consolidated Rate

(By

Airmail — Special to

"The Listener’)

October 7 ORE and more the arts are becoming public property, at any rate in England. It may be a monotonous story, this repetition of one essential factCovent Garden taken over by the State, sculpture exhibited by the L.C.C., ballet sent to fishery towns by the Arts Council, and so on and on-but it is a significant one.. It has not ended yet, or ceased to be interesting. The ,Local Goveznment Act, 1948, now permits municipalities to spend 6d in the pound out of the rates on éntertainment. Kensington is to be the first London borough to exercise this right, and beginning on November 17 there are to be fortnightly concerts at the Town Hall on Kensington High Street (opposite Barkers, Pontings, and Derry and Toms, those mansidns of merchandise for what Wyndham Lewis calls The Peke District. |Moiseiwitch, Kentner, Heddle Nash, and Campoli are already on the bill. Sixpence in the pound produces £70,000 a year in Kensington, but Alderman Jenkins, Conservative leader on the borough, who with the Socialist leader has backed the scheme, says it is hoped the concerts will support themselves, and if there is any loss it will be made good up to a sum

of £500. After which presumably the concerts would be called off. They will ‘be managed by one of the London ticket-agent firms, who have teams of experienced contert managers. Seventythree 1/- seats will be allotted to Kensington Youth Clubs. * * * ANY of this country’s finest private art collections are being scattered on loan to public galleries, because their once wealthy owners .can no longer afford to keep them cared for, or to keep the mansions that provided the hanging space. Thus many great masterpieces will be on public view for the first time. Some owners have approached London galleries, wishing apparently to retain nominal ownerships, but to have their pictures hung, rather than stored in anticipation of Mr. Churchill’s return to power, and kept at the right temperature. The Duke of Devonshire is the latest to do this, according to the Daily Telegraph. His assistant librarian at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, where his pictures are hung, told a reporter that he was "faced with problems of light and heat." Valuable pictures would rot away if he kept them where they are, on his present fuel allocation. About 20 of the Chatsworth collection are already on loan to museums. Another 60, the best, will be seen in a commercial gallery in Old Bond Street

in October (at a price) and: afterwards re-hung in museums. Among them is Holbein’s cartoon of Henry VIII which has never been publicly shown. Birmingham Art Gallery at present has two collections on loan, part of the Wantage Collection belong to Captain C. L. Lloyd, and Lord Rothschild’s, which includes some Gainsboroughs. Lord Rothschild gave up Rushbrooke Hall a year -ago and took a smaller house at Cambridge. The Earl of Ellesmere’ recently sold Bridgewater House, Piccadilly, and part of his collection has gone to the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, "on loan." % * % ‘THE L.C.C. recently provided exhibi. tion space in the Victoria Embankment Gardens, by‘ the Thames just below Charing Cross station, so that London’s unknown artists could exhibit their own work. It was a sort of free-for-all, but the only-unkindness came from the weather. Some of the painters who went there early in the morning to hang pictures on the wire netting seemed more upset about their frames being spoilt by rain than their pictures. Some were good, and some were bad, naturally; some imitative, and some original, It was a good idea, and might give some promising painters a free start. The artists themselves, standing at receipt of custom, were dressed in cloaks, sandals, beards (according, to sex) and (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) bright clothes. First come, first hung, but when a young Frenchman turned up from Paris, it is said, an English artist took down some of his pictures and gave him room. % Ea * AY TOMEN’S compacts decorated with 5; small Van Gogh, reproductions are not new. Now it has occurred to someone to design hats after the ,headgear worn in famous paintings. A display in London the other day included a black felt hat with a small brim, trimmed with green feathers, after MRenoir’s "Head of a Woman,"’ and the anchester Guardian says it was "perfectly wearable to-day." Even Picasso was ‘represented by a green pierrot hat with an upturned brim. * * om JN the end, this story leads back to the "Arts Council, which has lately opened in its headquarters building in St. James’s Square, near Piccadilly, a_gallery where small special collections ‘are to be shown free of charge, and open till 8.0 p.m. on two nights of the week. The room is extraordinarily beautifulparquet flooring, graceful plaster moulding painted in an off-white shatie of which the pigment is mauve, and graced with magnificent yellow curtains beside the windows. The first exhibition was one of drawings by old masters from the collection of the Earl of Leicester, Holkham Hall, (and this may suggest the same idea to some of the other owners of master-

pieces who can no longer look after them). The second, now open, is a collection of 55 lithographs by Picasso. Picasso, when he was last exhibited in England (by the .Arts Council, three yeafs ago) started a storm. Now he is again being "foisted upon the public." He was first introduced to England, by the way, in 1911, by John Middleton Murry and Michael Sadleir, who started a quarterly magazine called Rhythm, and printed a study by Picasso in the first number, and several more drawings in later numbers; they were attacked at the time. Storms and rages blew up in 1945, although that seemed rather late in the day. Now. there are these lithographs, all done between 1945 and 1947, and a good -nany of them done on "Dimanche."’ They cover ia wide range of Picasso’s own diversity, some. reproducing the style and texture of Spanish cave drawings, some (like the owl squatting on a chair) returning to cubism, and some using the technique of the phone-box doodler, but to considerably better effect. Some (mostly illustrations to Buffon — shells, birds, beasts, and flowers) are frankly naturalistic and romantic, And two or three centaur-variants are very risible. Eric Newton has written of them, and he fastened on to the fact that so many were done on Sunday-like a man solving the crossword puzzle while the dinner is cooling. If it is true that they don’t carry Picasso’s full force, that may be why there has been no howling and raging so far at the State’s patronage of them.