Modern British Sculpture?

 

The exhibition called “Modern British Sculpture” that opened at the Royal Academy today (until 7 April) is a fraud.

         It’s one of those shows intended to illustrate a theory or make an argument. Its publicity claims: “the exhibition takes a fresh approach, replacing the traditional survey with a provocative set of juxtapositions that challenge the viewer to make new connections and break the mould of old conceptions [my emphasis].” The trouble is that the “new connections” are so desperately old hat.

         OK,
room 2, “Theft by Finding” has lots of lovely African, Native American, Mexican
and Etruscan objects, such as we expect to find in the British Museum and the
V& A. You mean Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, F.E. Mc William and Leon
Underwood were influenced by seeing these artifacts? Well I never! You could
knock me over with a feather.

         And
that there’s something in common between Carl André and Richard Long? Or
between Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst? No! You astonish me. There is no reason
whatever for André’s installation and Koons’s (now tatty-looking) piece to be
represented in this show, except fatuity and fashion (last year’s, at that).

         You
can see why, at one of the many private views of this appalling show, an
eminent, older British artist told me how worried he was that the co-curator,
Penelope Curtis’s day job is as the new Director of Tate Britain.

         I
can see why he’s nervous. We all accept that this exhibition is not a
“traditional survey” (though could someone please remind me when was the last
traditional survey of modern British sculpture on the scale of this show?). But
look at this on page 16 of Dr. Curtis’s heavyweight catalogue. She is writing
abut Henry Moore’s world-wide celebrity and international demand for his work
following his success at the 1948 Venice Biennale: “A pattern established
through the demand for Moore was continued in the 1950s and 1960s with Reg
Butler, Kenneth Armitage and Lynn Chadwick…” According to her index, this is
the only mention of these three major British sculptors in the entire 316-page
volume; and there is not a single work by any of them in her show.

         I
knew Armitage slightly and, to disclose an irrelevant interest, Lynn Chadwick
and I were close friends in the 1970s. Speaking sub specie aeternitatis, it would have added a good deal more to
the sum of human knowledge (and possibly even to human enjoyment) if the RA had
mounted a large retrospective/survey of those three artists, or of British
sculpture of the 60s-80s, including a good deal more of the early work of Barry
Flanagan (of which there is one strong, but unrepresentative piece in this
feeble show).

         Just
to remind younger – or unfamiliar readers: Lynn Chadwick (1914-2003) came first
to public attention when he was commissioned to make three works for the
Festival of Britain (1951), and was one of the sculptors characterised by
Herbert Read as evoking the “geometry of fear.” He showed to great acclaim at
the Venice Biennale of 1952 and in 1956 won the Biennale International Prize
for Sculpture, beating Alberto Giacometti.  Though the British art establishment reacted to this British
triumph by neglecting him from the 1970s until he died, his work continued to
sell well, especially abroad. A couple of years ago a piece of his broke the
£1million barrier. There is a retrospective of his work on the theme of
“Couples” recently opened at the Pangolin Gallery in King’s Cross. I understand
that one of the pieces in it has a £1m price tag. I wish I owned one of the
“Beasts,” the near-abstract lion/dog/wolf-like creatures cast in bronze that
prompted Read’s brilliant description.