Arthur Pollen

Extract

The English, we have always been told, are incurably literary. When they produce painters their work is illustrative; when they produce sculptors their work is linear. However true this may once have been, the attitude is changing now. Perhaps the very fact that such a statement has become stock has influenced the trend; artists are on their guard and the current art school bogey now is ‘being literary’.

Our two acknowledged contemporary masters, Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore, are examples of the break-away from the literary. Illustration had bitten deeply into Sutherland in his early days. His Samuel Palmer-like observations ask to be clapped between the pages of a book; but this was only a stage in this artist’s development which, quite soon, he left behind. Henry Moore never seemed even to need to push off from the literary bank before he was swimming vigorously in mid-stream. From the outset he seems to have grasped the essential quality of sculpture—the necessity to conceive it solid, and he has never been tempted towards the linear.