He Sells What He Likes

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 812, 18 February 1955, Page 30

He Sells What He Likes

BY

NORMA

COUPER

HAT happens when a man whose business and hobby is art finds he cannot face another abstract painting? With Arthur Jeffress, rebellion was complete. He stopped looking at abstracts, gave up trying to sell them to other people and opened his own gallery. On the surfacé, the appearance of a néw art gallery in London would not be expected to cause more than a ripple of interest, but this was something different. The feature that caught the attention of the Press and the public was that here was a man trying to make a business of selling only the sort of goods that he himself liked. Not for him the wide range to suit popular taste, the security of Turner landscapes, Watteau’s graceflil ladies or persuasive Romnéys and Gainsboroughs; *for him was a narrow field of only three types of painting-Sunday paititing, trompe Yoeil and magic realism. To indulge a hobby. and expect it to make a living for oneself is to hope for demonstrative enthusiasm on the part of fellow collectors and the steady enlistment of converts, Arthur Jeffress was willing to take the risk. A corinoisseur in a city whefe art shops bristle throughout the West End. he was well known

for his long association with the Hanover Gallery (one of the biggest). With him from this same gallery, where he was secretary for many years, went Robert Melville, to help in bringing a fresh slant to the selling of pictures. And the styles of painting? Sunday painters are those who have never had any training. Yet that does not mean that Arthur Jeffress seeks, and likes instinctively, the art efforts of amateurs. Sunday painting has become a category that at its best. is defined most clearly in. the French primitives; There is an absence of "stylism," of drawing and of knowledge in depicting movement. The primitive painter has little regard for anatomy, his subjects are muscularly inert. He paints his tree or his house, ignoring perspective, shadows and form, and he paints entirely from imagination. Grandma Moses. America’s phenomenon, threw the spotlight on to _ primitive painting in the English-speaking world, her designs Starting a cult of simplicity in art that bewildered dealers and critics. It is strange that there can be a definable pattern to pritnitives, yet there is an easy similarity of thought and depiction between the work of primitive paintets in Europe and America. Arthur Jeffress classifies their work in this way: "They challenge the laws of pet-

Spective and gravity. The result is unorthodox, yet enchantingly communicative." The label many like to put on primitive paititing is "naive." It is, however, often sophisticated beyond the selfconscious brush strokes of the abstract or impressionist artist. Sir Winston Churchill is a Sunday painter; so was Adolf Hitler. But their paintings show the influence of the old masters and the effort to reproduce a visible effect. It would be a contradiction of the most puzzling sort, however, if either of these untrained artists had drawn from their disciplined imaginations naive primitives. In trompe loeil (literally "trickery of the eye") painters play a trick on the viewer, The method is usually the clever assembling on canvas or paper of an elaborate collection of "props," which ceceive the viewer through a clever stereoscopic effect into believing that the objects are real. Some of the best examples, painted near the end of the last century show theatre programmes, photographs, newspaper clippings, playing cards and pages torn from diaries tossed together — apparently haphazardly, but actually with close attention to composition. The result is a kaleideScopic pattern of startling effect, defying the viewer to tell whether or not

these are the actual objects imprisoned under the glass or frame. Into the same catégory come the 18th Century "port+raits with broken glass"-those tantalising pictures in which the shattered glass appears real but is painted. More modern are the strings of coloured buttons or Clusters of flowers apparently Spilling out of the picture, an effect achieved by painting on to the wood of the frame (or by painting the frame into ‘the picture). Of magic realism, it is less easy to write. The gallery manifesto describes it as an art in which actuality and fantasy are inextricably intertwined. A London critic who saw the gallefy’s collection by Aldo Pagliacci (devoted to such subjécts as burning churches and St. Sebastian machine-gunned) rématked that magic realism, must be "another name for that kind of neo-romantic painting which teeters on the edge of surrealism without ever quite dislocatifg cause and effect." But there is another aspect of magic realism, not covered by either definitions, in which the artist is so obsessed with clarity and detail that even faraway things ate in the sharpest possible focus. The result is that the pictures look more real than reality. The gallery will be givirig its first show of this kind of painting in Juné, when it will be exhibiting a Swiss artist, Adolph Dietrich, whose, work has not previously been seen outside his own country. Arthur Jeffress, though Americanborn, prefers to divide his time between

England and Italy. A bachelor, he lives part of the year in London and part in Venice, He is a man of distinguished appearance and urbane manner, He is to be the next sitter for the artist, Graham Sutherland, whose commissioned birthday portrait of Sir Winston Churchill inspired such a torrent of controversial opinion. This artist’s impression of Sir Winston showed strongly the implacable set to the famous jaw and suggested skilfully the weight of responsibility on this able brain, offering no hint of the blandness and geniality he often shows, The portrait of Arthur Jeffress will be interesting, too, for it is bound to capture, as well as the urbanity, the resourceful temperament and _ resolute spirit that made him, in peace, a successful business man, and, in war, led him to sharing an adventure that made world headlines, He was one of a group of 24 Americans who left the United States in 1940 in the Egyptian cargo steamer Zam Zam, intending to enlist with the Allies in Europe in the Medical Corps. The ship was torpedoed in the North Atlantic and the survivors. were captured by the Germans. They were taken to France and after internment for three months were permitted to leave for the U.S.A. in the last boat train out of Paris, carrying United States diplomats and their families. Details of the ship's sinking and the Americans’ experiences as neutrals in the hands of the Nazis were eagerly sought by newspapers and radio, On their arrival in the U.S.A., they became objects of national interest. Reluctant to hark back to those days and to his actual participation in the war later, Arthur Jeffress remembers merely that the incident was a novelty, first because the Zam Zam was the first ship of ‘any other than the hostile countries to be sunk during the war, and second, because Americans had not volunteered in great numbers for service with the Allied forces. Back to the present---Arthur Jeffress with his gallery not only made news in opening, but was able to report an unusual occurrence. All the pictures of the first exhibition were sold within a few days. Here was evidence of how much the venture was a calculated risk, for Mr, Jeffress had chosen his first exhibitor wisely. She was the Sunday painter who had achieved phenomenal world prominence in the short space of six years--Eden Box. (An article on the work of Eden Box will be printed next week.)