An artist of many parts
New Worker Online
An artist of many parts
by Dolly Shaer
Ken Sprague, people's artist - John Green, Hawthorn Press, Stroud, 2000,
illus, pbk, 134pp. #25.00.
KEN SPRAGUE is an artist of many parts - painter, cartoonist, print maker,
poster designer, graphic artist, sculptor, banner designer, muralist,
sometime TV presenter and psychodrama therapist.
He has for most of his life worked in the labour movement, for the old Young
Communist League's Challenge, the Daily Worker, Tribune, Morning Star and
the TGWU journal The Record. He worked at Unity Theatre and was a member of
the Artists International Association. He together with Ray Bernard set up
the publicity firm of Mountain and Molehill, which served the union
movement. In recent years he travelled to Yugoslavia and Iraq to record the
suffering of the victims of imperialist aggression.
Though many of Sprague's cartoons and posters, like the Anti Apartheid
poster and the Stephen Lawrence print, will be familiar to older readers
this book brings examples of his art across the decades to a new generation
that barely knows him. But the book is marred by the revisionist stance of
the author, which presumably reflects the thinking of the artist himself.
The tone is set in the opening lines:
"Ken Sprague -peoples artist. Why this title? The term 'people's artist'
makes a bold, if not pretentious claim - an artist for, and of, the people.
It is not synonymous, though, with 'popular artist' and the latter's
connotations of pandering to the lowest common denominator and enjoying
widespread popularity. It should not be confused either with the somewhat
tarnished version bequeathed to us by the Soviet Union."
chronological
The book is in the main a chronological account of Sprague's life and
involvement in the working class and therefore a chronological account of
the struggle for socialism from the 1940s onwards when the artist joined the
old Communist Party of Great Britain. And one of the main problems with this
book is that Green quotes verbatim from Sprague but on many other
occasions it is difficult to work out whether Sprague or Green is talking.
The concluding chapter opens with a quote from Picasso that ends: "No,
painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of the war
for attack and defence against the enemy". Though Green summarises the
history of art through the centuries dealing with alienation of the artist
from society as it has evolved he uses it to take another swipe at the
Soviet Union and the Stalin leadership.
Referring to "Socialist Realism- the Soviet model" the author attacks
Stalin for what he claims was the restrictive reign that Stalin forced on
the Soviet artist. "Everything had to adhere to the Party Line", he says. He
grudgingly concedes that "in the former Socialist countries the artist may
have had their freedom restricted in terms of style and content, but they
were given a social purpose.while in the west Western art was at the mercy
of the art market" only to conclude that: "Marxism became a
pseudo-scientific dogma divorced from its profoundly humanist core. It was
this separation that led to the show trials, the suppression of dissent and
the eventual collapse of the system."
judged
Sprague, of course, will be judged by his lifetime's work rather than the
revisionist and nonsensical views of his biographer. The book is profusely
illustrated with 16 pages of colour prints and almost every page has pen and
ink or linocut illustrations from the artist's portfolio.
Though the book costs #25.00 copies can be obtained for #18.00 (post free)
from John Keaveney, 110 Hazelwick Road, Crawley, Sussex RH10 INH.