REPORT ON THE ARTS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 495, 17 December 1948, Page 12

REPORT ON THE ARTS

WEAR BOOK OF THE ARTS IN NEW ZEALAND, No. 4, 1948. Edited by Howard Wadman. The Wingfield Press (H. H. Tombs), Wellington.

(Reviewed by

J. C.

Beaglehole

OT exactly with excitement, but still with a measure of lively interest, do we stretch out. our hands for this book. What has Mr. Wadman got into his net this time? Silver, shining, fish of a good healthy size, flapping away briskly even in captivity, leaping all over us in their determination, not to be caught too easily, making a break for the open sea-or a rather dead, inert grey lot of creatures somehow dragged up from the ocean bottom? If these specimens are good ones they’ll be hard to keep within the covers of a’ book, they'll burst right out of the pages and scatter their vitality all over the room (to retreat somewhat from our marine metaphor). Fish or not, they will glow, they will radiate, they will do something strange and disturbing, yet enlivening, to us. They will shake us up, give us glimpses of a far country, renew our’ spirits-in short, do all the things that Art does for mankind. Well, of course, the specimens aren’t @s good as all that. After all, the net is one that is regularly put down, the book is an annual event; it is a progress report, not'a very lucky dip or a selection of the World’s Great Pictures, It is a selection, but a selection from what is going, in the visual arts, plus critical reports on the drama and an anthology of the year’s verse. It is difficult to make a satisfactory whole of a book like this, to make it a first-rate example of constructive design, but Mr. Wadham knows that as well as we do, and we needn’t press the point. Let us say straight away,

therefore, that though the general feeling one has after turning over the pages of reproductions is that this is much the same mixture as before, yet that feeling is not quite just. If we look carefully, do some counting, we shall probably find that the quality of the book is improving from year to year. There is still the same ‘divided inten-tion-(a) to be representative, (b) to reproduce the best that has been done -and the mediocre casts a blight that is all fhe more effective from the absence, in the mediocre, of colour. Some of the good things desperately need éolour, too. McCormack simply doesn’t come off in black and white, Sam Williams’s very fine Tempest panel gets the emphasis all in the wrong place. On the other hand, one or two of the colour prints aren’t worth the expense devoted to them.

BUT ha! Here is a real fish! Woollaston’s conté drawing of Edith Asleep. This is a triumph. This really is something to drag out of ‘the deep, I must confess I did not know how triumphant it was till I saw it here, reproduced in exaetly the right way, "bled" all round the page. Congratulations to Wadman the fisher, as well as to Woollaston the producer. What else is there? Yes, Maclennan in colour is good, Vida Steinert in colour is good, the fish are lively. The colour work is good for these two, good blocks, good printing; it is not so good in Russell Clark’s Charladies. The Toles came out well, good solid fish, these, firm flesh. Colin McCahon’s Crucifixion jumps and hits me . hard, astonishingly effective in black and white. Joan Smith is good, Fisher is good-but this sort of enumeration will get us nowhere. Let us make a rough count: the net has gathered in between

_ seventy and eighty specimens; a couple of dozen are good ones, not all of the biggest size, but with something, one fancies, of the authentic gleam, some liveliness of the eye, some iridescence of skin and flap of the tail -well, perhaps we’re not doing so badly after all, what. a pity we can’t chuck the odd fifty back into the sea and let them float away. ‘THE metaphor becomes embarrassing, Let\us turn in simpler terms to Architecture. The light, space, air provided in these houses would be encouraging if they were "representative." Are they representative of domestic architecture in New Zealand? One hesitates. The same names tend to recur from year to year, surely? Well, at least there is good work being done, modern (not . _"modernistic") in feeling, and for that let us be

thankful. The Theatre? Interesting critical essays here. Things worth arguing about have been happening in Auckland, Wellington and _ Christchurch anyhow; the time is ripening for a National Theatre (see last paragraph of the Wellington article).-Is anything happening dramatically, visually, in any other way, in Dunedin? The impression one gets from this Year Book is that Dunedin is dead. Films? Some vigorous thinking here from Mr. Andrews. Music? What has happened to music in 1948? There was plenty of it about. Perhaps it just got clean away from the net, swam round the edges. Verse? Mr. Fairburn has collected nearly thirty pages of verse for us-impossible to summarise in a sentence, but there are some younger men here with a sensibility to words that is cheering; e.g., Mr. Oliver, ' The Maidgn is many and manifold is The entreaty she makes.to the world ... Verse, one fancies, is at the present moment in a very healthy state in New Zealand. ACK to Mr. Wadman. Mr. Wadman gives us an excellent bit of writing, well illustrated, on The Shape of Things in New Zealand; or, if you like, a Sermon on Design. At last, we rejoice to note, someone has taken up, among other things, the question of our deplorable postage stamps. There are a few points that. might. profitably. be argued with Mr. Wadman (there is more scope for

argument in some of the modest pronouncements made by "Featured Artists" here and there in the book): but really, if anyone is looking for a "message to New Zealand" let him add Mr. Maclennan’s remarks on craftsmanship to Mr. Wadman’s pages and there is all the message we need just now. Design, craftsmanship: the note of criticism that is beginning to sound in the Year Book is a welcome note. Perhaps the year will come when Mr. Wadman will cease to feel the need for tenderness (you can see he is hardening a bit) end really let himself go. Design: how does the book come through itself, as an example of design? Well, here this reviewer would like to let himself go, but that would mean an‘other thousand words. It would not be all "destructive" criticism by any means, but there would be a good deal of expostulation and argument. One thing about the book is quite surprising-that the large inside margin of the text pages has come off so well. The extraordinary. things you can do, and get away with, in display! Of course it couldn’t be done twice. And here this reviewer (alias "I," "we," "one"), still feeling rather puzzled about the problem of reviewing the unreviewable, rather vague, rather breathless, rather as if he had made a mess of the subject, must end. He has to catch a train. Is that what’s wrong with (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) the arts in New Zealand, really? Are the artists always having to catch a train? TOLD BY GIPSIES A BOOK OF GIPSY FOLK-TALES. Selected by DORA E. YATES. Phoenix House, London. HESE folk-tales are interesting for two. reasons. They have a racy quality which shows in every line that they have been told repeatedly to swatthy listeners around the doors of caravans, and they reveal the essential unity of folk literature in all languages. "The Little Cinder-Girl,’ for instance, is true in spirit to the universal theme of the despised youngest sister who makes an excellent marriage, although there are some fantastic variations. Indeed, many of the stories are so wildly improbable, even for fairy tales, that they seem to have been conceived in laughter. They are told with a gusto which comes out superbly when the nartrator stops to look with twinkling eyes at the open-mouthed audience around him. Best of all, perhaps, is the conclusion of the first story in the book: "And I deserve a big pudding for telling

thee this lie."

M.H.

H.