Art
New English Painting
THE weeks after Christmas are usually barren of painting exhibitions of the first rank. The galleries are back on their second line of defence and their reserves hold the fort till the arrival of new troops in the middle of the month. This year the reserves have been unusually sound and the .new troops, unusually early in putting in an appearance. - The most important of the new shows is that at the Redfern Gallery, consisting partly of a group of early Sickerts and partly of paintings by Ian Fairweather. The Sickerts are nearly all small conversation pictures or landscapes— taking this term to include such themes as views of Venetian architecture. They represent therefore the field in which Mr. Sickert is most indisputably successful. His more recent works may make a more immediate appeal, but they some- times disturb by their crude subtlety and sometimes alarm by their elaborate escapism. These earlier works, on the other hand, call up no such doubts. Sickert was at that time obviously in direct contact with things, and these notes combine such spontaneity with such wit, such psychological insight with such observation of colour and tone, that they seem to be one of the last refinements of European painting. Ian Fairweather's paintings at the same gallery form about as strong a contrast with the Sickerts as, one could imagine. Mr. Sickert deals with the minor aspects of ordinary life around us ; Mr. Fairweather paints China or the Philippine Islands. Sickert relies on the subtlest and most restrained effects ; Fairweather on directness and richness. Sickert loves the half-light of an interior ; Fairweather all the sun he can get. At first sight it is tempting to pass over Fairweather as being simply another Gauguin who, dissatisfied with his own life, has escaped into a sort of dream-life in tropical countries. In some of his paintings he seems certainly to have been caught by oriental glatnours, as for instance in the rather superficial Landscape mear Pekin (34), but in general he faces his unusual subjects in a very matter-of-fact spirit and so avoids any false romanticism. This is particularly the case when he paints groups of figures or single figure studies, such as Philippine Girl (32), in which nothing disturbs the effect produced by a lovely and novel feeling for colour com- bined with draughtsmanship which• is rapid but 'not slovenly. Something of the same matter-of-fact approach has saved what is Much' the best painting in the Group of Oxford
'Painters' exhibition:at Cooling's, namely, Kenneth Rowntree's
=Spanish Picture (37). The theme of this painting is romantic enough, the -sunlit hillsides and village life of Spain, but it is treated with such calmness and calculation that all possi- bility of falseness vanishes. Unlike almost all the other paintings in this exhibition (and, one might almost add, elsewhere in Bond Street) this is a picture and not merely a note about nature. It is based on minute observation, but it is consciously built up into a highly elaborate com- position in which' notes on landscape, buildings, local dress and character are all forced into a single quite complete whole. 'The miracle is that it should achieve all this without becoming remotely academic. It seems to contain the germs of the kind of realism which is wanted at the moment —realism in the wide sense which can combine calculation with observation. Two other paintings in the exhibition show the same kind of aim carried out less successfully : Thea Brown's Joy of Man, which seems somehow slightly loose in structure, and Frances Murray's White Horse, verging on the academic. Of the rest most are devoted to renderings of nature, of which Humphrey Waterfield's two landscapes of Mentone (42 and 49) are perhaps the most nicely Observed.
• The most interesting of the general shows of the moment is the Goupil Winter Salon at the French Gallery. It shows a representative group of the most moderately progressive English painting of today. There are good paintings by Dunlop, Cooper and John Nash—the last particularly in water-colour—and a number of other familiar figures. Perhaps the most important are two landscapes by Stanley Spencer which seem to be waiting for figures to give point to them and turn them into successful wholes like his Hillside, Cookham, at. Tooth's. Among other exhibits is a concrete group by Peri, an artist who has emerged from abstraction to a new realism, and seems, incidentally, to open up again the possi-
bility of figure groups in sculpture. Arrrirmsy BLurrr.
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