The Academy, 1929

Extract

This year’s Academy was awaited with unusual interest. A new President is always something of an excitement, and Sir William Llewellyn’s frequent intercession for the expressionists and post-impressionists led some people to cherish expectations of a change in policy. But no epoch-making innovations are apparent, and, indeed, hopes of the sort indicated must inevitably remain chimerical, it seems. Once again we can rejoice in the high standard of technical achievement permeating the whole exhibition. But we shall find very little Art in the proper sense of the word. Academy artists are hopelessly provincial despite their undoubted talent and sensibility : and provincial art does not count. The real tradition on which art lives is ignored, and in losing touch with the European current we are weighed down by the slough of suburbanity. It is not as if an independent art was being worked out in a grand and isolated fashion. There can be no deus ex machina about art . . .; it grows—often up the wrong tree—but it must draw its life blood from ‘influences.’

There is a considerable improvement this year in organisation. Black-and-white drawings, etchings and engravings now have Gallery VI to themselves, and we are spared in some measure what has hitherto tended to mar previous exhibitions—namely, the somewhat indecent association of sculpture with mural paintings in a decorative ensemble—The Picnic of the Borejoisy—as an aesthetic butcher was once heard to describe the general effect produced. In any case, the combination was never really successful. In spite of this arrangement, however, certain discontented exhibits have strolled into the fields to frolic.