Art
[LONDON ARTISTS ! jD IIONORE DAUMIER] FOR those who like that sort of thing—the sort of thing that Mr. Roger Fry, Mr. Paul Nash, Mr. Duncan Grant, and more particularly Mr. .William Roberts, stand for—there is much to enchant them at the Leicester Galleries_; for those who do not, there is much to exasperate. Yet, even leaning to the latter side, one has to admit the ability of these painters, and the force which several of them get into their work. Before a landscape like Miss Vanessa Bell's " The Pink House " one says to oneself " It's alive." Perhaps one even says that before her pictures of red-hot pokers and spikey artichoke flowers : these are the kind of blossoms which lend themselves best to this kind of treatment. Yet the composition is achieved by making the artichoke heads lop over—as of course they do when cut—and lose the stiff erectness that is their character. Nobody will quarrel with Mr. Roger Fry's painting of buildings : " Cany " and " St. Jaques at Dieppe " are strong in handling and dignified ; but when Mr. Fry paints landscapes, he sees the world fluffy : in his " Game of Bowls " the scorched hills of the background are full of woolly stones. Mr. F. J. Porter, in his " House at Cagnes," suggests the garishness of southern sunlight, as if he disliked it. But this same artist has a nude in which the suppleness and the weight of a mulatto girl's golden-brovin body is beautifully rendered. It is a masterly piece of execution, such as artists hive in all times striven to accomplish, and such as most of these artists, no doubt for some good reason," seek to avoid. If Mr. Duncan Grant puts a head and face like that of a battered doll on the figure in his " Mother and Child," it is assuredly not because he could not do otherwise. However, he does not follow the example of another artist and show us what he _can do when he chooses in the way of simple expressive representation.
Mr. Roberts, who can manifestly do what he likes with
brush and pencil, chOoses to treat people's' bodies as sugges- tions to transform or deform at will. In general, it pleases him see their legs as stovePipes, tubes more or iess jointed in the middle. The man in " Newspapers " has fore-arms and hands of roughlyheini Wood. In the picture of Trafalgar Square, the pigeon's are wooden or leaden suggestions of pigeons, the people comic suggestions of people. Elsewhere,
especially in the " Garden of Eden," there are suggestions of lewd people : " Surprised " combines leering with menace. Only, -there is no mistaking that Mr. Roberts does, with his distortions, get the maximum of expressiveness : and in the group which he calls " Newspapers " his colour, always fine, reaches something like the quality of old stained glass. This canvas has in its way a beauty just as indisputable as Renoir's picture of massed umbrellas (in the Tate), and it has the dramatic element as well. ' - -
It is worth while to go from the Leicester Square show to the Lefevre Galleries in King Street, to see how an earlier artist achieved expressiveness without distortion. Daumier is little seen in this country, and here are nearly a score of things by him. In the tiny " Les Buveurs " he gets as much energy as Mr. Roberts, and without such emphasis. Or again, in a quieter way, the study of a woman, herself heavily loaded, helping a small over-burdened girl up the steps from a washing place, says its say gently, but touchingly.. Daumier's colour is dingy and unattractive.. But. " Tete clakimine in pen and ink, shows a choleric colonel about to explode as well as if he were an apoplectic red ; and in the group -of lawyers (" Les Avocats ") a dozen heads are fully characterized —at least for purposes of caricature without colour.
LF.mov. GnEy.
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