GALLERIES

Despite all the critical revisionism that has taken place since Herbert Read's celebrated essay accompanying the sculptors shown at the British Pavilion of the 1952 Venice Biennale – Chadwick, Armitage, Paolozzi, Butler, Clarke et al – an essay which referenced Freud on sex, Sartre's existentialism and T S Eliot's 1920 poem ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ (‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas’) among other things, it somehow remains Read's profoundly poetic reading of this astonishing sea change in immediate post-war British sculptural practice that still lingers most tenaciously in the memory. All these thoughts have been provoked by Osborne Samuel’s superb, virtually museum quality exhibition (many of the works have been borrowed from private collections and not shown in public for many years), entitled 'Aspects of Modern British Sculpture', which takes a look, some 65years or so on, at the astonishing impact that this, and the subsequent shows of these artists' work had, not just on contemporary British sculpture of the period and subsequently (1960s New Generation and even 'Sensation' are unthinkable without it) but internationally as well. Alfred H Barr of MoMA New York, for example, admonished The Guardian critic for her lack of appreciation ‘for the most distinguished national showing of the whole exhibition’. And looking at the works in this show, one is struck yet again by the underlying truth of Read's collective reading of this seminal moment. For while there were indeed huge changes in their methods and materials – welding, steel and iron etc – contributing to their revolutionary visual impact, these works were, too, all made by young men who had lived through not only a horrific war but were living under the very real threat of the atomic bomb – not so very different from now in fact – which is maybe why these sculptures still resonate with such force for us in the present moment. And Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ was, it should be remembered also, written in the immediate, and despairing, bitter aftermath of the First World War – profound truths all. If ever there was a symbol of the new internationalism of the contemporary art market, then Frieze London and its Spring cousin in New York is it – nearly 300 galleries, divided into two separate sections (Frieze London and Frieze Masters ) and drawn from more or less every country in the world that has any kind of art market, however nugatory. How you view it – as a mark of rampant capitalism’s insistent intrusion into virtually every aspect of human culture, or the worldwide democratisation and globalisation of visual culture – depends more than a little on where you stand politically and a little also, perhaps, on how you feel about the idea of art fairs in the first place. That said there are always, if you are determined (and have a comfortable pair of shoes!), some quite wonderful and astonishing things to be seen here, most particularly in the Masters section where the world’s top dealers in non-Western art and Antiquities show, shoulder to shoulder, with those dealing in European Old Masters and classic 20th century Western Art – one moment an Indian miniature, the next a Jackson Pollock – and where, money to one side for a brief moment, you may regain a powerful sense of the universal and vital human need to engage in symbolic activity, to dream the world around us. Built in the 1880s for an anticipated congregation of 1,200 people, the quite astonishing structure that was first known as the church of St Alban the Martyr in Teddington was declared redundant less than a century later and was only saved from demolition by the passionate determination of local people who R OUND-UP 8 GALLERIES OCTOBER 2017 R agged claws World class Real gothic

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