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The Times (13/Jun/2001) - Alors, messieurs, what's the Hitch?

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Alors, messieurs, what's the Hitch?

The Pompidou is showing Alfred Hitchcock in his broader artistic context, says John Russell Taylor

There are very few names in 20th-century art that make the hearts of intellectuals and populists flutter with equal intensity. Picasso is possibly one; but the other is unmistakably Alfred Hitchcock. Especially in France, where one could almost imagine him to be a French invention. And so has the new summer blockbuster at the Centre Pompidou, Hitchcock et l'Art.

Now that few people anywhere in the world question Hitchcock's bona fides as an artist rather than merely as an adroit entertainer, no one seems to feel any hesitation in linking him with other artists and other arts. During the centenary year, 1999, there was a show at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, which set out to show him as an inspiration to the artists of our own time.

If that exhibition enhanced his own artistic status, this was largely because most of the artists involved, working in a wide variety of media, seemed to be following him with excessive servility, reconstructing rather than deconstructing Hitchcock images and effects in such a way that most of such power as their works possessed was poached from the source rather than fuelled by it.

The approach of Hitchcock et l'Art is very different. What this show sets out to do is to take Hitchcock's right to serious consideration as an artist as a given and move on to consider what light the other arts can throw on Hitchcock himself, instead of what effect Hitchcock has had on other people's art. In consequence it is arranged in terms of themes and recurrent images rather than, say, chronologically.

The first gallery is in one sense an amusing indulgence. In a large darkened room we wend our way among uniform vitrines glowing in the darkness, one for each of Hitchcock's films. Each one contains a single object which is judged to evoke most vividly the film concerned: a glass full of cloudy liquid for Suspicion, a bunch of keys for Notorious, and so on. But as well as being a curator's baroque flourish, this also immediately implants the idea of Hitchcock as in every way a visual artist, conveying his significances through the eye much more than by words, working on the subliminal and letting the intellect go hang.

Of course, the French being the French, speculation about the intellectual substructure of the Hitchcock oeuvre is present from time to time. The treatment of North by Northwest is a case in point: two favourite ideas among French critics have always been that, since the title is supposedly derived from Hamlet ("I am but mad north- north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw"), the whole script is a disguised reworking of the play, and that the famous sequence of Cary Grant being pursued by a crop- dusting plane is choreographed according to strict geomantic principles.

I once gave Hitchcock a hefty intellectual French magazine devoted exclusively to this one sequence, which he found highly diverting: both he and the scriptwriter, Ernest Lehman, were categorical that the title had nothing to do with Shakespeare and that the crop- dusting sequence was entirely based on visual effect rather than a detailed intellectual programme.

But happily most of the show does not work like that. It begins with significant images of Hitchcock's childhood - photographs of the police station where he was famously confined for five minutes on his father's instructions with the words, "This is what happens to naughty boys", the primary school he attended behind his family's greengrocer's shop in Leytonstone.

Incidentally the exhibition perpetuates the old error that the little boy on the pony in the picture of the shop decorated for Victoria's Diamond Jubilee or Edward's Coronation is Hitchcock himself, when it is actually of his elder brother William. (Appropriately for a man of mystery, no childhood photographs of Hitchcock seem to survive.)

Then we go through such pervasive images in Hitchcock as the music- hall and variety theatre, comparing extracts from his films of the Twenties and Thirties with paintings and prints by Sickert, Vuillard, Rouault, Valloton and others, and the effect of the Decadent art of his youth, preoccupied with the morbid imaginings of Poe and the depredations of the femme fatale, on his own subsequent imagery.

Beardsley, Khnopff and Alberto Martini are pressed into service here, though Edmund J. Sullivan, who taught Hitchcock to draw, is oddly absent. There is a collage of images of the passionate kiss in Hitchcock compared with Rodin, Picabia and Magritte, and Hitchcock's almost fetishistic interest in women's hair and footwear is vividly evoked.

Later on, the cool abstract graphics of the typical Hitchcock composition are compared appropriately with the American Precisionist painters and with Op Art, his use of grills and cagings with Caillebotte and Klee.

And, as you might expect, the central and most detailed section is devoted to the collaboration between Hitchcock and Dali on Spellbound. The dream sequence for the film was completely designed by Dali - under instruction from Hitchcock as to the precise content of the images - and made up in storyboard form by William Cameron (Things to Come) Menzies, the art director James Basevi and Dali himself, not to mention Hitchcock, whose sketches in the margins of some of the drawings have unfortunately been covered by new mounts.

Comparison does not necessarily imply equation: to compare Stoppard with his Shakespearean sources is not to say that he is "as good as" Shakespeare. But here there is no temptation to argue with the curators' assumption that Hitchcock is on a par with the major 20th-century painters, illustrators and sculptors who are called upon for support and illumination.

It has been said that Hitchcock not only practised cinema, but he was cinema, transforming himself into a film. The show offers some insights into how he achieved this, but in the end, despite this highly diverting and enlightening journey, the central mystery of the man and his art remains intact, as perhaps it must.

Hitchcock et l'Art is at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (00 33 1 44 78 12 33) until September 24