Art
Whom the Gods Love
By SIMON HODGSON
HAS the old tag ever appeared more inane than when applied to the two artists who have retrospective exhibitions in London now, and who both died in their thirties? At the Tate Gallery, the Arts Council has arranged drawings and paintings by the late Francis Gruber, an artist still largely unknown in this country—and even, although to a lesser degree, in his native France. Gruber destroyed much that he painted, and the best of his work is still largely concentrated in the collection of M. Jacques Bazaine and that of his widow—who now runs one of the better restaurants in Paris.
However, it is a far cry from the luxury of Les Petits Paves and Madame Gruber's steaks to her husband's canvases, for here austerity reigns, even in the most romantic subjects, and, in pictures painted during the war, desperation as well. When he was ill, and keeping , to his studio in the war years, his early nervous fantasy disappears and leaves only the harsh angles of the studio stair- case, the sullen light through the high window, perhaps a thin, sag-breasted model, kept warm only by a shabby red waistcoat, sad, ugly and resigned, and in each picture the bare cupboard under the stairs, two bare shelves, a bare floor and a piece of anonymous lead piping. His line at this period settles into that style which was to be so abused by later painters—angular and austere, opposed to any form of flattery or pleasure. Gruber was to continue developing until he died. But it is from this period that Buffet borrowed his note of false anguish, which he destroyed by failing ultimately to understand it, by playing it too long, too publicly and too loud, and by turning it out wholesale.
Gruber is an intensely private painter, and leaving aside Buffet, who deserves no considera- tion in this context, it is interesting to imagine another painter in the same tubercular, war- deadened situation. Take, for instance, John Bratby, as his work has been seen recently in London. Bratby's mood and his abilities meet only in huge compositions well populated by people and objects which can create drama, not of them- selves, but by interaction and association. Bratby, much as he is to be admired, cannot disclose his intentions without an elaborate dramatis per- sona,. He cannot 'reveal these characters' inter- actions in the face of one person, not, to do him justice, that he pretends, as yet, that his know- ledge is deep enough for real portraiture; but this also means, however fair one is, that Bratby can- got, as yet, penetrate below the public surface of his mood and subject; he is, in fact, privately dull. Without drawing to close a parallel between the two painters, One may note that Bratby is now roughly the same age as Gruber at the end of war; and the latter's work is more gripping and causes more uneasiness, as well as more satisfaction because of its inward-looking exploration of a private existence (in, it must be said, a very literary set of visual terms—in earlier pictures words and phrases appear on banners, and the symbols are those of surrealist apologists).
The origins of these intimations of unresigned despair lie as wide apart as surrealism itself, in questions of presentation and in the artist's pre- occupation with hidden impulses, and the odder characteristics of private existence, and (at a more fundamental level) German expressionism. Some early landscapes at the Tate recall extremely vividly ,Corinth's sullen valleys and ugly paint, which 'grip attention with iron fists, to bruise and shake it into submission. There is something oddly German (Gruber was an Alsatian-Parisian) even in the use of surrealist vocabulary, in the insistence and obtrusiveness and angry angularity of the symbols with which, in early years, he covers his tilting grass and empty skies. In fact, the surrealism, on closer examination, seems more and more a veil thrown over canvases by an obsessed and ascetically elegant Cranach. Rich- ness of texture is reduced; a canvas is pierced by arrows and bleeds; the face of the poet is sweet and innocent, but the hands are those of Dorian Grey; doors open into vast emptiness; and on the back of Don Quixote's horse a hungry bird waits impatiently.
All that was essential to this mood, but without the mess and the fuss and the uneasy romanticism, became the ingredients of the war-time studio pictures; and the later work was painted more solidly to produce in us a more present sense of desolation and deeper echoes. One more clearly separate period remained to him, and these last landscapes, with figures just emerging from adolescence populating the middle distance, are the joy of the exhibition. In them Gruber has used a new range of colour, softer and lighter but more acid, to construct spaces so enormous and so perfectly judged that they will in the future, one may guess, be considered as some of the most remarkable works of the age. The drawing is still nervous, but it is the exploration of space in his earliest work and the exactitude of tone which is so startling in the picture of the Ile de Rd of 1938, Which here reach' a sort of culmination. Gruber's early death was an appalling loss.
The other posthumous exhibition takes us to more familiar ground—that of Christopher Wood's work at the Redfern. Under the bright- ness and the charm, and under his delicious paint, this French painter disguised as an Englishman has, like Gruber, a personal unease and a private voyage of exploration to make. He, too, as every- one knows, died too early to visit more than a few ports (to overstretch the metaphor disgrace- fully) before his death. • Three notes. At the ICA Gallery Mr. Man Ray's retrospective exhibition demonstrates the hair's-breadth by which Dada symbols work or remain immensely trivial. Tooth's miscellany Paris-Londres' has some pictures that should not be missed—a Derain especially. At the White- chapel Gallery Mr. Robert Erskine and Mr. Bryan Robertson have arranged an exhibition of three years of Graphic Art. Mr. Erskine's standards and enthusiasm are well-known, and the show is intended, not as a retrospective survey but as a hint of the beginning of a new movement. Two presses will demonstrate etching and lithography, and bankers and government officials—who can well use a whole edition of one lithograph in their various branches and offices—might find here an idea in which patronage and reasonably priced decoration meet in something more valuable, and infinitely more stimulating, than board-room portraits or hunting prints. Ceri Richards for Barclays, Michael Ayrton for the Ministry of Education. Man the presses, Baring, Rothschild, Ausbacher and Tuke! Schroder will follow if you give the lead. I hope to write about the Odilon Redon lithographs in St. James's Square later.
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