A PROPER PLACE FOR THE ARTIST –
ALAN JOHNSTON AT THE HENRY MOORE INSTITUTE
I travelled by train to Leeds recently, to see the exhibition of new work by Alan Johnston at the Henry Moore Institute.[1] During the journey I re-read a transcription of a recording of Ad Reinhardt, made by Mary Fuller in 1966, a year before his untimely death, and later published posthumously by Art Forum as An Ad Reinhardt Monologue.
The reason for this choice of reading lay in wanting to look again at a part of its content that reminded me of some of the qualities I admire in the Henry Moore Institute itself.
In this polemical piece Reinhardt explains that he often took language considered to be negative about art, and made a virtue of it instead. Included in his list is ‘academic’:
… I picked them up and said, “Well, why not academic?”
I tried to oppose the academic to the market place. I think in the future I see mainly the university academy as the proper place for the artist because, you know, the market place is insane.[2]
He continues:
Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school and even in New York the majority are. That’s an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that. I’ve never been involved in that particularly. Now I’ve been teaching for almost twenty years.
I have always found this passage interesting, having taught for many years myself, and in this country too, art schools have provided vital support for a significant number of artists. In this interview Reinhardt expresses some ambivalent views about how art was being taught. But on my train journey to Leeds I was thinking about his words “ proper place for the artist” because that is exactly what the Henry Moore Institute has always felt like to me. I first got to know the Institute under its previous nomenclature as the aptly named Centre for the Study of Sculpture and I spent four weeks of the summer of 1995 working there as a research fellow, photographing and writing about the distinctive cast of Rodin’s The Age of Bronze, which had just entered the collection of Leeds Art Gallery.
While the Institute is not the kind of teaching establishment that Reinhardt identifies, in the form of universities or museum schools, it does have an especially strong, international academic reputation based on the high degree of valuable scholarship that underlies its exhibitions. During the time that I worked on the Rodin sculpture, I found that there was also something of the quiet focus and concentration of the studio, as well as the study, about the Institute. I realised how much it can be a place of work and creative production for artists as well as scholars. (I produced a portfolio of photographs and a book there.) There is a closeness, of the perception of art and the making of art, evident in exhibitions there that seems to express something about how the Institute itself originated. Like many artists I know, I am moved by the awareness that the support for art provided through the Henry Moore Foundation was made possible by the labours and generous foresight of another artist.
I was reflecting on these thoughts during my journey, but it was not until I arrived and walked into Alan Johnston’s exhibition that I realised quite how serendipitous my choice of reading had been, for Johnston had spent three weeks working in the galleries, drawing directly onto the walls themselves. The galleries of the Institute had indeed become the studio. But beyond that, the art of proportion, rectangular subdivision and sensitivity to the extreme subtleties of light present in Johnston’s work there, established a reflective atmosphere in which I sensed a kinship to the meditative dimension of experience induced by the later works of Reinhardt himself.
This exhibition also marked the departure of the Institute’s founding curator Penelope Curtis, to become Director of Tate Britain. Together with her team she has fashioned the intellectual and curatorial architecture of the Henry Moore Institute and in fact, the architectural in relation to the sculptural has been one of the Institute’s recurring subjects of investigation over the past years.
Alan Johnston’s wall drawings map new territory in this spatial realm, engaged as they are with the different heights, lights and proportions of the three galleries in the Institute. The rectangular subdivisions, outlined by frames of lightly pencilled, articulate scribbling, are all positioned on the upper parts of the walls, drawing the eye upwards and gazing up at the walls I remembered the physical sensation of looking up at Piero della Francesca’s frescoes in Arezzo. Yet it was not only the attitude of my body that prompted the memory, it was the proportions of the rectangles and the knowledge that high up there, the intricate entanglement of the pencil drawing carried on even though the eye could no longer pick out its details. This modest, abstract presence on the walls is what reminded me of the Piero’s, in which all the fine, caring, crafted minutiae of detail of the lower levels of the frescoes continues up to the highest points, far beyond the reach of the eye. On conveying these thoughts to Penelope Curtis I learned that Johnston had been discussing these frescoes in conversation about his work prior to the exhibition opening. Serendipity was in the air.
When Ad Reinhardt expressed his thoughts about certain kinds of institution becoming increasingly important for artists, he was suggesting contexts that could seeking I sustain what we might call thecontemplative practices and traditions in the making and apprehension of art. We see this reflected in the concentration of his own paintings and painting methods. I can also imagine him regarding the ‘academy’ as a good context for the pan-cultural breadth and historical depth of his life-long interests. That is very like the kind of context created by the work of the Henry Moore Institute. Ad Reinhardt would have liked it there.
David Ward March 2010
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