“Bourdelle”: sculpture in cast bronze and a few drawings; The Fifth Annual Hallmark International Art Awards, painting, all at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor; the “Sol Upsher and the A. M. Robertson Collections,” paintings, at the Oakland Art Museum; Pat Cucaro, painting, at Creative Arts in Sausalito; the “Gallery Group” of paintings, crafts and sculptures at the Quai Gallery in Tiburon; “The Hunters of the North,” artifacts, “Drawings and Sculpture by Contemporary Sculptors,” all at the University of California; Holt Murray and Daryle Webb sculpture, and “Wood and Stitchery” all at Richmond Art Center. These exhibitions must all be reviewed together because the central ideas which are necessary in order to evaluate them grow and are modified by contact with the works in each exhibition in succession. Readers who want only to know the style or size of the work in the various exhibitions will need to read clear through. However, if you want simply a rating of each show’s potentiality in the eternal derby, skip now to the last paragraph.
The Hallmark Awards at the Legion open up immediately the question of purpose in exhibiting works of art. The exhibition is a large one, containing fifty-five works by many well-known artists. Many well-known styles are present also. In fact, most are there. A visitor to the Quai Gallery in Tiburon will see the same styles, practised often with equal facility. But the artists at the Legion are internationally famous; those at the Quai, if not utterly unknown, are famed in no more than a hundred mile radius of the San Francisco Bay Area.
There must be in the world very many of these one hundred mile circles. There is one in Seattle, in Portland, in Los Angeles, in Reno, and even in Red Bluff. Each such circle has artists in it; some of the circles (Paris or New York) have thousands. Why pick on any few, in any circle, and carry them half way around the world to show them to people? The devastating emptiness of the Hallmark show, the equally talented, skillful, infinitely less expensive and perhaps even less empty presentation by local unknowns just across the water from it in Tiburon all point up this question.
The Bourdelle show, and the Hunters of the North, and even the Wood and Stitchery, suggest an answer. Art is precious and irreplaceable and worth effort to see. But the Hallmark and Quai gallery shows are mostly not art. Bourdelle’s Head of Apollo, is art, is worth walking far to see, and worth stealing to have: it is irreplaceable. And the stuff of the hunters, their carved masks, walrus tusks, and their kayaks and parkas and harpoons, the sight of them is also irreplaceable. But the Drawings and Sculptures by Contemporary Sculptors are “common,” they intensify the tedium of the day, they, and their thousand counterparts are part of it. One exhibits, and one seeks to see, works of art in order to experience the special, the irreplaceable: not the imitation, the duplicate, the substitute, but the “real.” Bourdelle’s Head of Apollo is real. The carefully made cracks, the artfully achieved and polished patina, the overall shape and representation, the skill of casting, all work together to make an object, a thing, which radiates, which reverberates, which is transparent to the vision beyond the eye because it rests in a full, accomplished reality in the eye.
Holt Murray’s and Daryle Webb’s sculptures at Richmond confirm this. Their metal plates, rods, castings, etc., never rest in the eye because they always stand there as representations of something else. The rods are substitutes for lines, the plates represent the desired location for planes, the cast parts are where curves or special textures are supposed to be. The act of the viewer is to substitute for these substances the abstract design elements which they represent. Thus, in a peculiar new sense, these works are “literary” and, in the last analysis, the work of art is not there; these objects are stand-ins for it until it arrives. Sometime, someone should investigate the formative experiences of artists like these. Do their formal urges, and their criteria of imagery come from direct perception of the world and the works of art within it, or do they come instead from text books about art, and pictures in magazines of art today? Could a sculptor such as Holt Murray go on in this current mode and level if he had ever seen Bourdelle’s Apollo or any other “real” sculpture (which is not all that rare?)
Maybe this contact with reality, with real materials and making them the incarnations of real meanings, seems a bit stronger in Richmond’s Wood and Stitchery show, just because “art” is a secondary matter here. The works are not directed by their makers so much to a certain kind of contemporary art “look” as they are to a modern craft “feel.” It is perhaps easier to illustrate a look than a feel, easier to have literary, superficially intellectual positions about things and their meanings than about one’s sensory experience, feel, of them. Thus, maybe, art as such can more easily slide into quackery than can craft. Anyhow, some of the craftsmen (they probably all, regard themselves as artists) in the show do actually make art as its basic type is defined by the Bourdelle Apollo. Kingsbury, Elliot, Brofft, Kraut, and Cross sometimes in their needlework or their woodwork achieve to some extent the fusion of intellect, meaning, and sensation, substance, which is art. Perhaps the meanings are often trivial and the sensations trite, but at least they are fused into the art experience.
All of this, the problem of the nature of the art experience and the separation of idea from incarnation, seems to trouble the observer most when he contemplates contemporary art. When one turns even only half a century into the past, this entire mode of dissatisfaction with art fades away. The Collections of Sol Upsher and A. M. Robertson at the Oakland Art Museum bear this out. Minor works by minor masters (if that) they nonetheless do not cast one into a despond about art: maybe because their concerns are so remote from our immediate ones that we can relax and enjoy what seems a simpler past, when illustration was what art was all about anyway. But, at the same time, when a living artist, Pat Cucaro at Creative Arts in Sausalito, attempts this same mode, literally nothing results: not the charm of a dead past, only the tedium of a failed present.
Anyway, on the basis of all the rumination and cross comparison above, this reviewer would suggest that money be bet as follows: Bourdelle, win; “Hunters of the North,” place; “Wood and Stitchery,” show. As for all the losers, the Quai Gallery is least melancholy, because least pretentious; The Hallmark Awards most annoying because very much the most pretentious.
Helen Ludwig, drawings and watercolors at the San Francisco Public Library. Miss Ludwig’s works are competent renderings of the local scene as horizons.
––Fred Martin
