ART
The Royal Academy
WHAT one has a right to expect from the Royal Academy a summary, a recapitulation, of the year's art. Such it providtd, more or less, a hundred. years ago. Slow accretions of positive taste and behaviour have enzrusted this cumbersome body, and today its old trunk only shows through deposits of pompousness, slickness and puppetry here and there. But patches of the body do show still, and while they do the animal will go on usefully prowling. This year there are signs of less self-satisfaction, of more self-examination and self-discipline. "Modern art," strained through the Academy jelly-bag, is almost absent. There are hardly any problems. The portraits are more interesting as paintings than usual. There is a little young blood of good quality, and there is a rather sharper distinction between the dull and the diverting. As a review of the year's art the show puts everyone off the scent as successfully as usual. As an insti- tution with an impressive background that still applies a public brake to experiments, -fruitful or frivolous, it still has its uses.
There is still a great deal of swagger : there are forests of curiously-posed limbs and acres of uninteresting and often revolt- ing paint. But here and there the sensible academic tradition revives. Reginald Brundrit, R.A., exhibits several Yorkshire landscapes that have an unassuming beauty and urgency. One called Nightfall discloses a vision of a river w_ith sloping banks and a few trees which the artist has dressed with a poetry as rare as it is truthful. It shows a quiet appreciation of all kinds of pictures of the past without being slavish or mannered. It belongs naturally on the walls of the Academy, and its existence here would alone justify the exhibition. It gets one nowhere in particular, but it cements good relations with the past ; and that is exactly what the Academy as a whole might do if only it would halve itself in size, and concert its energies. Other personal choices among respectable landscapes and sea- scapes are the paintings by Sir W. W. Russell, R.A.—pale yachts, sensitive seas and skies ; Ethel Walker, A.R.A.—seas forlorn ; R. 0. Dunlop, A.R.A.—palette-knife charm in greys and duns ; John A. Park—atmosphere• in Snow Falls on Exmoor; Edwin Baird—sensitive pastiche out of the Renaissance, by Christopher Wood; Nigel Newton—fresh views of Mount's Bay and Pilchards ; L. F. Lupton—dim but tasteful views of Chiswick ; Lamoma Birch, R.A.—the Spirit of Cornwall, more searching than usual. Algernon Newton, A.RA., shows an immense Suffolk landscape that has in the centre a stretch of slate-coloured stream so just in its colour that it almost raises the picture above the large drawing-room level. But in the small South Room there is a tiny landscape by him, measuring fewer square inches in area than this measures square feet, that has as much charm and as much content.
Augustus John easily beats all the other portrait painters by his intelligence about character and his lively paint. The Hon. Vincent Massey is a fine painting ; H. S. Goodhart-Rendell, Esq., naughty and very nice. R. G. Eves, R.A., still relies too much on trappings. His straight painting is spirited enough for him to disrobe his sitters a bit. There are some good board-room portraits, with a pleasanter paint quality than usual. From Euston Road comes Victor Pasmore by Rodrigo Moynihan, and from Victor Pasmore comes Woman With a Veil. They are very welcome, though they look disconcertingly natural. Land- scapes by John Nash, new A.RA., mellow the walls here .and there. Edward Le Bas shows some ambitious and creditable compositions, Bonnard-influenced. There are good portraits of evacuees by Katharine Church and Frank Goulding.
The sculpture and the drawings, engravings and etchings are chiefly of technical interest. Among the water-colours there are
still too many literally purple passages—there is too much dash and too little interest. The single Wilson Steer tells, twilit as it is, and works by Thomas Hennell, Lord Methuen and John Nash must be reserved for praise. In the Architecture Room academic water-colour faults are unconsciously guyed. Knobs of rough paper poke their way through wet-looking mauve washes; pencil points have been dug into soft paper so that the high tide of a full brush might swamp a territory furrowed with miniature channels Here are all the tricks that ought to have had a decent burial in the cast-raom at the art school. I have some volumes of Academy Architecture of the 'eighties and 'nineties that show these tricks were quite the rage then.
Palm PIPER.
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