Last week a London art dealer, Mr Edward Spellman thrilled a New York audience by bidding for a picture on the transatlantic telephone line.
The picture was the ‘Merry Lute Player’ by Franz Hals and the price he paid was 600,000 dollars. The next day it was announced that the picture would again go up for sale in London soon. A day later on the eve of the opening of the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy its President, Sir Charles Wheeler, disclosed three preliminary bids of one and a half million pounds were received by Sotheby’s for the Leonardo cartoon ‘The Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Anne’ when it was proposed to auction it last year.
The Academy, it might be recalled, had decided to auction the cartoon last year because of financial difficulties. This provoked an outburst of popular concern at the continuing export of masterpieces to America and the Prime Minister himself intervened to persuade the Academy to stop the auction. The people then raised £800,000 to acquire the cartoon. Between them these two stories illustrate the popular interest in art on one hand and growth of investment possibilities in this field. No wonder British papers cover art sales in their city columns which we call the commercial page and use the same jargon.
Market Note
To quote one typical opening of such reports “impressionists are easing a little, apart from a few bright spots. Selective buying of early Victorians is edging prices higher while prints and drawings, both old and contemporary, are showing plusses.” The art market is truly booming and even the prices of shares and stocks does not appreciate as fast as that of art and antiques.
Stamps and rare books are also attracting fabulous prices. A rare Mauritius stamp was sold for five thousand pounds two years ago and again for £8,500 last month. The price of Audubon’s “Birds of America” in four volumes has risen from £9,000 to £13,000 in just four years. The general picture is that the prices of old rare books is up by 50 per cent in two years. There is a similar boom in the sale of old coins and even vintage port is becoming a subject of investment.
In London today there are 124 private galleries selling pictures and mostly doing well. The sale of prints is a separate matter because most of the larger department stores are also in this business. Before the war in 1939 there were only 25 private galleries. There has been a similar rise in the number of art students. We are now in the midst of the exhibition season and the galleries are looking forward to the peak months of their best season ever.
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AS usual, the Royal Academy’s 195th exhibition – the first one was held in 1769 – is a vast affair. By the time one has looked at the 1,332 (selected out of 4,000 entries) paintings, drawings, prints, pieces of sculpture and architectural models, the dominating feeling is not one of exhilaration but of exhaustion. The enormous size of the exhibition has attracted a good deal of criticism and it is said that a number of able artists do not exhibit here on this account. The case for reducing its size is obvious.
The exhibition has also been criticised because of the predominance of traditional works. John Russell summed it up well when he wrote, “To go through the galleries you have to abrogate the privileges which the art of the last eighty years has conferred on us. You have to forget that colour has been emancipated once and for all. You have to forget that since the nineteenth century space need no longer be measured out according to renaissance principles. You have to forget that since 1918 the poetic imagination has called the beaux arts bluff. You have to retreat forty, fifty, sixty years”.
One notable feature of the exhibition is that the influence of satire on art has never been so obvious.
A cement figure of a seated judge shows a set of prison bars instead of the head under the wig. A huge ugly and derelict factory building blotting out everything including the sky bears the caption, “West Riding Landscape.”
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It has been reported that William Rushton who has imitated and mimicked Mr Macmillan in “That Was the Week That Was” television programme would contest the election against the Prime Minister. The money would be worth the laugh, his friends say. Whether he does so or not there can be no question about the impact of this first ever satirical programme on television, now off the air for the summer. The New York Times London correspondent was not far off the mark when he wrote Mr Rushton had perhaps become better known than the Prime Minister. Eleven million people watched the programme week after week. Such was its popularity that conversation would stop even if one had guests at home.
Jobs Landed
The participants have landed good jobs. They write regular columns in newspapers. They have been signed up for revues and films. They form subjects of cartoons in national papers. They are interviewed for social columns in newspapers. In fact, the angry young men and women have become so famous and prosperous that they are themselves beginning to wonder if they can remain angry for long. The sister publication Private Eye is now selling 80,000 copies every week. Not long ago when I wrote about it the figure was 50,000.
The artists are apparently seeking to follow Swift who once suggested that the final solution to the problem of the population explosion in Ireland was that the Irish Englishmen should eat Irish babies. The same kind of indignation against cant, hypocrisy, injustice and unreason has informed the television programme as well as the shows at the Establishment club and revue “Beyond the Fringe” now in the United States. The critics have called it destructive and sick humour. But their outcry has been drowned in popular applause.
To illustrate my point let me quote from the song that Millicent Martin sang during the last programme of the series that ended two weeks ago.
Asked to go back to Mississippi, she sang:
Where the Mississippi mud
Mingles with the blood
Of Niggers hanging from
The branches of the trees
This song was provoked by the shooting of Mr William Moore, a Baltimore postman, during a protest march. The same merciless treatment was given to the Home Secretary in his attempt to deport the Nigerian Opposition Leader, Chief Enahoro. Such instances are too many to be recalled. One can say a new spirit is abroad.
After the satirists the people most in demand currently are comedy script writers and comedians. Literally the cheque books are out. Independent television for instance have signed two script writers for £25,000 and the BBC has given one comedian a contract for £20,000.
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Without comment: From the British Medical Association magazine Family Doctor – “Many parents without realising it are doing considerable psychological harm when it comes to this question of modesty.
“Consider for a moment the case of a man who slips into a strip tease on the quiet. Is he deprived? No, not really. His escapades are more pathetic than wicked.
“If he has been brought up in an atmosphere of open frankness concerning the human body and its functions there would be no need for strip tease shows.
“Those who sneak into strip shows are going back to the nursery. They become furtive little boys again, seeking a thrill out of looking at something they have been brought up to regard as forbidden.”
The Times of India, 12 May 1963