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The museum is an assemblage of
irregular caverns in which you immediately
become a disconsolate wanderer in search
of order which is not there.
The Royal Academy of Arts was once the protective
haven of tradition that its name suggests. Here is the
announcement of its forthcoming exhibition: “Abstract
Expressionism will forever be associated with the restlessly
inventive energy of 1950s New York. Artists like
Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning broke from accepted
conventions to unleash a new sense of confidence in
modern painting. Experience the scale, color and energy
of their radical creations in this the first major survey
of the movement in the U.K. since 1957.”
Abstract Expressionism is a phrase that would have
sent my friend Sidney into a disquisition about bogusness.
For a start, the two words have no genuine association
and have been shunted together to give an
appearance of scholarship. Far from being restlessly
inventive, the three identified artists were dealing in
splodges and stripes connected, if at all, to interior
decoration rather than painting. A new sense of confidence
implies an old lack of it, now being resolved.
That phrase, and the co-opted nouns “scale, color and
energy,” amount to a euphemistic way of concealing
the role of the agents and dealers and collectors who
have made a market in these painters, and buy and sell
their canvases as ersatz stocks. The only thing that is
radical is the sum of money put into speculations of
the kind. I know one collector who spent a hundred
thousand pounds on a picture so constructed that it
would fall to pieces and disintegrate so that after ten
years nothing would be left of it. To buy a picture in
order to boast that money is no object to the purchaser
goes way beyond ordinary bogusness.
I conclude with a shaft of good news. There are two
art schools in Florence engaged in counter-revolution,
that is to say teaching technique as it was taught and
practised in the time of the Old Masters. Graduating
from these classes, students should be able to restore
to art the human element and the moral judgment that
goes with it. We will all be the better for it. n
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