Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [54]
‘You’ve certainly changed your style, Dan.’
‘True, O King.’
That had always been a favourite expression of Tokenhouse’s, especially when not best pleased. I tried to think of something to say. The Camden Town Group had been wholly superseded, utterly swept away, so far as the art of Daniel Tokenhouse was concerned. What had taken its place was less easy to define; a sort of neo-primitivism. The light was bad for forming a judgment. So revolutionary was the transformation that a happy phrase to cover just what had happened did not come easily to mind. The new Tokenhouse style, in one of its expressions, suggested frescoes, frescoes on a very small scale; not at all in the manner of, say, Barnby’s murals once decorating the entrance to the Donners-Brebner Building. After some minutes, Tokenhouse himself making no comment, I felt compelled to pronounce a judgment, however insipid.
‘The garage scene has considerable force. Its colour emotive too, limiting yourself in that way to an almost regular monochrome, picked out with passages of flat heavy black.’
‘You mean this study?’
‘Both of those. Aren’t they the same group from another angle?’
‘Yes, this is another shot. Three in all. The subject is Four priests rigging a miracle. The rather larger version here, and its fellow, are less successful, I think. At the same time both have merit of a sort.’
‘You always make several studies of the same subject nowadays?’
‘I find that produces the best results. I work slowly. That comes from lack of early training. My difficulty is usually to get the values correctly.’
‘The browns, greys and blacks seem to create an effective recession.’
‘Ah, you have misunderstood me. Having, so to speak, forged ahead politically myself, it is easy to forget other people remain content with old notions of painting, formalists ones. I meant, of course, that it is not always plain sailing so far as political values are concerned. I am no longer interested in such purely technical achievements as correct recession, so called, or making a kind of pattern.’
‘Still, incorrect recession can surely play havoc – unless, of course, deliberate distortion is in question. Was your change of technique gradual?’
Tokenhouse gave a restive intake of breath to show how wildly he had been misunderstood.
‘One forgets, one forgets. Let me explain. I had begun to feel very impatient with Formalism, the sort of painting that derived from Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, not to mention their successors, such as the Surrealists – as I prefer to call them, Pseudo-Realists. I thought about it all a lot. I long pondered the phrase read somewhere: “A picture is an act of Socialism.” I don’t expect you’re familiar with that approach. You may not agree anyway. Your dissent is immaterial to me. I made up my mind to embark on a fresh start. I began by taking a bus over the bridge to Mestre, and attempting some plein air studies. I set about one of those large installations there – hydro-electric, or whatever they arc – a suitably functional conception. Absurd as that may seem, I created the impression of being engaged on some sort of industrial espionage. Nothing serious happened, but it was all rather tedious and discouraging. Much more important than the interfering attitude of the authorities was my own fear that Impressionist errors were creeping back, just as fallaciously as if I was one of the old ladies sitting on a camp-stool in front of the Salute. In short, I comprehended I was still hopelessly aesthetic.’
‘I’d never call you an aesthete, Dan.’
Tokenhouse laughed shortly.
‘Certainly not in the nineteenth-century use of the word. All the same, you have to watch yourself. We all have to. That was specially true of my next phase, when I thought I would try Political Symbolism. The effect was very mixed. I’ve painted-over quite a lot of them, wiped them out completely. This is one of the rather