No_1_February_and_March__1939 — Page 19

Hong Kong Builder

ARCHITECT • PAINTER

SCULPTOR

What will be the future relation-

ship between the three Arts?

By R. MYERSCOUGH-WALKER, A.R.I.B.A.

25

THE

HE three Arts of Architecture, Painting, and Sculp- of that particular run in English history and coincide

ture are now divorced one from the other.

with the revival of Classic learning known as the Renaissance.

I see them as three colums converging towards the apex of a triangle. The converging sides of the figure are the two minor arts, Painting and Sculpture. The spearhead is the Art of Architecture, which, of all the Arts is pursuing a direct course guided by the logical application of the machine.

The figure, proceeds from a point which marks the early English form of Art into a region which is con- cerned, not so much with a practical expression, but rather with the complicated questions of individual expression as it affected by the laws of metaphysics and the representation of space. And these questions are by no means to be ridiculed; they do, however, result in a division of the Arts in an unprecedented way and cause the mother of the Arts to regard its offspring as some- thing very much over her head, or, alternatively, beneath her feet.

A contemporary building has no inclination to be adorned by, or to allow space for, contemporary sculp- ture. The interior of the building does not allow of the hanging of paintings. None of the movements by artists to alter this fact will make any impression or the progress of architecture and the divorce is inevitable.

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The situation is merely an extension of English history and the assurance of my forecast is based on the unchanging direction of the separate Arts over a period of centuries-on the growth of the individual and the subversion of the natural art form.

So we see the figures of men like Inigo Jones and Wren having their designs covered with the work of Grinling Gibbons, Francis Bird and, placed in panels, the paintings of Hogarth, Lely, and Kneller.

In the thirteenth century such artists as we know individually are outstanding only because of some in- defatigible archæologist. The Art of Building was a priestly vocation and Sculpture was the interpreter of Christ to the mob. Paint was applied to the building, and MSS. were illuminated by drawings.

It was a tidy world. Indeed, the effort for symmetry and the orderly character of the Arts took on a quality utterly opposed to the rather satirical, personal, and wholly emotional work of the Gothic period.

The fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries were a natural growth of that Gothic development of the Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular styles. The man responsible for the work come down to us not as names, but as a horde of craftsmen working in a particu- larly natural and, so far as they were concerned, universal

way.

The culmination arrived with the Grecian revival incident to the discovery of Pompeii: the Adams Brothers in architecture, John Gibson in sculpture, and Hoppner in painting.

Holbein, John Thorpe, and Nicholas Stone, painter, architect, and sculptor, respectively, mark the break-up

W

HAY'S WHARF

SCULPTOR: FRANK DOBSON

A panel which formed one of a series incorporated into the Thames-side building designed by H. Goodhart Rendel some years ago