March 1969
Going back to London fills me with such dread that I have to plan my stay nowadays. At first I used to think it was that long nerve-racking air journey, then I found that London itself—the people, the Art scene – puts the cold hand of fear on my heart.
I have to confess that this time I got a shock. My moment was the Anthony Caro show at the Hayward galleries on the South Bank. This was the real event for me in London. As a student, one didn't think of Anthony Caro as a major artist, and indeed he wasn't in the sense of stature alongside other young artists. [Somebody like Elizabeth Frink whose recent drawing show at the Waddington Galleries was one the high water marks of my recent three week visit. The show was a complete success.] Nor did the fuss they were making at St. Martin's School of Art make much sense to me [perhaps that is saying more about me than about what actually was happening] because the Caro works I admired, if at all, were those compact lumpy and largely witty sculptures like Man Smoking or Smoking Heads. They were lighthearted and English in the same proportion that Giacometti's work seemed profound and universal. But this exhibition was something of a revelation. Caro's work has been bracketed with the work of people like David Smith and Kenneth Noland in painting. It is my contention that Caro is a "gent" alongside these people. The persistent feeling one got from the Hayward Gallery show was one of frolic and gaiety. Here was a man who enjoyed what he was doing in a different sense and is presumably doing it for different reasons. Now this is a very special quality, very English.
I remember sitting on a jury with Frank Auerbach – a comprehensive showing of whose work, it is rumoured, is due fairly soon at the Marlborough Fine Arts – at about the hottest moment of the Pop Art thing. He rather passionately rejected the work of a friend I had encouraged to submit. The work got past the jury. It in fact fitted amply with the show and the mood of the London scene at the time. But perhaps knowingly, what Frank was attacking was my friend's attitude which came out blatantly in the work. It wasn't so much that he was an old Etonian dabbler but that art for him was something one enjoyed doing and with whatever one pleased. John has since written a long, loving and complicated treatise on flying saucers having given up painting and the Mosely facists party as uninteresting.
This quality of mordinate fun pervades some of the best English artists. Be it Roger Hilton's having no reverence for his major prize winning painting at the John Moore Exhibition a few years ago or the major part of Caro's work at the Hayward. I can't imagine Caro working through a tough self conscious autobiographical phase like David Smith: as discussed by Lawrence Alloway in the last issue of the magazine. This is a joy exhibition in the real sense. Caro is no amateur. In fact he must be a strict professional to do quite as much work and teach. I would say that with William Turnbull and a very few others in London, he really is committed. However the element of the fanciful is so strong, it is impossible to remove the game fantasy aspect of the works and take them seriously. Caro breaks all the rules, I suspect, without taking any of them into consideration. I mean much as he must know what a rectangle is all about, it doesn't bother him, he just uses it and be damned. So with color, so with ready made material, R.S.J. tubular stuff, etc. Anthony Caro's work is not difficult and demanding as say Turnbull's. On first confrontation this work looked [perhaps I mean to be the uneducated eye] like a lot of metal of the "found" type, bars, plates, nuts and bolts, and so on, carefully but rather haphazardly put together and carefully painted bright colors. The opportunity provided by the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank to see this work at its most advantageous is truly commendable. The show takes up all the space there is and rather splashes and lavishes its way into the open air sculpture courts.
The Caro breakthrough or "revolution" which completely passed me by as a student was suddenly revealed. For one thing that uncomfortable feeling one gets of objects [especially those cumbersome freestanding sculptures in gallery rooms] competing with one for space [making one immediately take up a rather aggressive, superior and rigidly critical stance – you go up and touch it as though fondling abstractedly, a girl or give it the once over to see what the possibilities are] is almost totally missing in this exhibition. The galleries are filled works but "look" remarkedly open and unconstricting. Quite the contrary one felt one could approach the whole thing unimpeded the way one would pass other such structures in the real world. Added to this is the complete extraction of the menace [that lamppost which looms as you sit in the passenger seat of a motor car, the sudden realization with its attendant vertigo, that that massive bridge is only supported by the seemingly flimsiest of structures] from my identifications with the modern industrial landscape by the actual choice of painting in sweet or candy colors and the free associations of ""inside""the studio and outside in this world. The gestures of these sculptures are distinctly accommodating. One walks along or past these works almost saying to oneself "well, it's a bit of all right isn't it" suppressing a chuckle. One would like to get acquainted. Suddenly Caro's work has that universal touch.
After this, I had to admit that London was different. The place is changing or do I mean it has changed. For instance Norman Stevens had a successful show at the Hanover Gallery. Norman is an exact contemporary of David Hockney. They are the same age and started Art School in Bradford at the same time. It is my opinion that Norman is a very good painter and there is a real respect and admiration for what he does in that underground esoteric sense for which art scenes are notorious, whereas David is a star. Norman's work is not characteristically English in that it is not involved with grey and understated. It is bold, precise, matter of fact – painted in bright, crisp colours. In a sense, his is a very private surrealist world whose only connection with the English thing is that spiky [prickly?] uncomfortable feeling one has come to expect from Graham Sutherland. However, in Norman Stevens' paintings, one feels it is not forced and aggressive but rather delicately balanced and poetic with more than a touch of sly humour.
