FROM THE ARCHIVES:An astonishing 1,700 guests attended the opening of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in the National College of Art in 1962. The 32 paintings and 15 sculptures on display included 12 paintings by Italians artists and the exhibition was reviewed at length over two days by a critic signing him or herself D.F. He or she did not pull their punches, as this extract shows.
I SALUTE CAMILLE Souter for her achievement in Ireland After Italy(No. 2), and I admit that I did not know she had it in her.
Neither would her other two paintings at this exhibition lead one to suppose so, but in this monumental fusion of convoluting form with an ambience of silver sheen, muddy green and dibbling brown, she has locked together an emphatic statement. I wish all her moods were so powerfully conceived and executed.
Richard Kingston is another painter of weather moods and his large Mood Between Seasonsis one of the most striking pictures in the exhibition. Structurally, it is not completely resolved, but I love the point of confluence of his flowing white and red and yellow rivers where they mingle in multicoloured flecks. Brown Projection(No. 48), with its planned explosion in controlled space, is more satisfying.
Louis le Brocquy and Patrick Scott seem to conceive of painting as a sort of haute couture business allied to interior decorating. I suppose this is what comes of being fashionable and liking it.
"This year it will be misted canvas," Scott seems to have said. He has given us three canvases which would be quite suitable on cotton fabric or wallpaper – limitless yards of it – and one (No. 8, A Quiet Morning) which, almost by accident, is a pleasing picture.
For some years, Le Brocquy has had vaguely physiological interests. He began with long streaks which were meant to be humans and, as the seasons passed, reduced them to tasteful head medleys (No. 3 is one of them).
Now he is reducing a stage further by putting a dollop of white on a blue canvas or by bringing (No. 62) a white squiggle to life on a white canvas and setting it off by a delicate shadow- suggestion. I predict we shall soon have plain painted canvases in which he will invite us to admire the smooth nothingness.
This is probably an enjoyable game to play – seeing how far your public are prepared to follow when you have become an artist of “international reputation” – and there is no doubt that the best way to hold the devotion of some kinds of public is to insult them with increasing directness.
Of course, another way to regard No. 62 is as a return to the duller sort of naturalistic painting: perhaps Le Brocquy was painting a white wall!
On the other hand, it sometimes occurs to me that his and Mr. Scott’s sort of painting are most legitimately seen as attempts to portray what is called the “open mind”, the sort of mind that lurks behind the sort of face we call “vacuous”.
http://url.ie/6yto