Newspaper Article

Take a pop! ; Groovy Sixties art is under attack by academic bores. Don't let them spoil your fun, says Matthew Collings, who presents his alternative guide to Tate Britain's blockbuster survey of the swinging decade

Collings, Matthew

2004

Overview

In the TV programme the US abstract artist Ken Noland, now in his eighties, is asked what he thinks of [John Latham]'s 1960s assault on Art and Culture - Noland is an artist whose work [Clement Greenberg] fiercely championed. He says he thinks it was hateful. I found myself agreeing. However, this work of Latham's from the very beginning of the decade is surprisingly lovely as art. Its shapes are nice. There's a nice passage of yellow, where he's painted the inside of some of the books. The yellow is lovely against the buff of the un- primed flax-canvas and the blue-ish white of the plaster. You can't possibly work out what on earth he thinks the meaning of Film Star is supposed to be, but everything's arranged very pleasingly according to classic Cubist good-arrangement principles, or classic 1950s abstract painting - the books don't quite fill up the canvas, there's space to breathe. In fact it operates according to all sorts of Greenbergian good- taste principles. We know Richard Hamilton is a great guru of Pop. He led a style rebellion against old-fashioned gentlemanly tastefulness in British art. Does he deserve his reputation as something special? $he, which he reworked between 1958 and 1961, achieves a certain visual quality that exists in the type of modern art he's parodying. This quality is pleasure in the play of curving abstract contours and divided-up space. It's a kind of space that forces you to notice that it is discontinuous. Picasso does the same space- jump thing and so does Kandinsky. With Picasso it's in a context of lovers and still-lifes and harlequins and cavaliers. With Kandinsky the imagery refers to nature - clouds, mountains and so on - but it's a schematised highly abstracted version of nature, not perceived but imagined, and so extremely abstracted that it's hardly imagery at all any more. With Hamilton it's a sneering imagery of toasters and fridges and pin-up girls. Only he presents these image-fragments in a spare, elegant way, with sophisticated, paired-back colour. These are just the sort of pseudo- \"qualities\" that were the stock in trade of advertisers in the Fifties. But Hamilton spins them in a way that turns them into something visually great rather than sleazy. Another Hockney masterpiece - this is Man in Shower in Beverley Hills (1964). The painting is about the creation of different kinds of space through various kinds of flatness. A graphic quality is contrasted with free painterliness. A naked man bends over in a shower. There's a wall of tiles in grey. Brightly coloured furniture is seen far away. Maybe it's a glimpse through a hatch. The body is very painterly, very smudgy, with different tones blended roughly into each other. Also enjoyable is the surprise way that the water plops onto the shower floor in little stylised scooped forms. This all sounds a lot, but the overall feel of the painting, which is large, is of a marvellous economy. There's a big black silhouette of a potted plant in the foreground. It's strangely threatening, since the leaves are so phallic. How does Hockney's fantasising work? The painting is erotic everywhere, like Manet is erotic - everything has undertones. They seem both deliberate and unconscious. Those chairs in the background make you think of sitting, so you come back to bottoms and that pot plant. There's something terrific about the one broken tile. It breaks the logic of the whole tile-pattern loveliness that dominates the painting. It's like a rule of pattern in visual art: repetition and variation. You set up something and then insert a quick surprise - which might return us to, well, no need to spell it out again.

• Publisher: Independent Digital News & Media
• Subject: Caro, Anthony / Collings, Matthew / Flanagan, Barry / Latham, John / McCullin, Don