From 1952: The critic ponders the plight of professional painters but who, for economic or personal reasons, have little actual time to work
This spring exhibition, organised by the Hampstead Artists Council, is like last year’s and like dozens of others. There must be thousands of paintings painted every year like the majority of these. And for that very reason it is perhaps worth analysing the content of the show. Out of the eighty-three paintings. forty-five are landscapes, mostly either local or continental, and fourteen are still lifes, many of which are flower pieces. Apart from three nudes and five portraits, only eight pictures are concerned with people. Of these eight, only four are specifically concerned with a human situation. Except for one rather woolly abstract work, all the pictures are painted in a roughly representational style. The piecemeal influences are Van Gogh, Sickert, Bonnard, the Fauves and the Euston Road School. The average size is 20ins. x 16ins.
There are six interesting paintings and one good one – a still life by E. Swinglehurst. The rest are extremely weak: weak because they lack drawing or any sense of consistent purpose. Time and again, one finds a picture in which in one passage the main interest is in colour-pattern, in another passage in straight representation, and in yet another in purely tonal contrasts. As a result none of them looks finished. They remain possible ideas for paintings.
Why is this so? One reason may be that most of these pictures are painted by men and women who wish to be professional painters but who, for economic or personal reasons, have little actual time to work. When they get a free afternoon or week-end they feel that whatever happens they must get a picture painted. The results are then haphazard because all the constant, intermediary processes – the persistent working out a definite attitude, the frequent consideration of half-finished work, the experimenting with alternative ideas, the discipline of drawing for its own sake – have been omitted. Another result of their unenviable position is that, because their work has to be made into a separate activity to be defended against the demands of ordinary life, their pictures reflect a similar estrangement – as the figures I quoted demonstrate.
Of course the problem is far easier to describe than solve. Yet finally its solution depends upon such painters claiming one of the two stools which they now fall between. They must either accept the status of amateurs and so exchange their frustration for the unhurried assurance of a hobby; or they must fight with more ruthless determination as professionals. The intermediary state is Bohemia.
First published in Art News and Review, 19 April 1952
