ART •
i! William and Mary Scott." At the Leger Galleries.—“ Picasso and Matisse." The Victoria and Albert Museum.
THE reader is certainly familiar with the names of Picasso and Matisse, whose works are now displayed upon the somewhat despondent and disapproving walls of the Victoria and Albert Museum. On the other hand, the reader may not have heard of William Scott, whose watercolours may be seen at the Leger Galleries, and who is therefore better served by a notice than the mighty noises from France whose publicity has been admirably handled for thirty years. Scott, unlike Picasso, who has been lucky in this respect all his life, has had to spend several of his valuable years in the Army, which has consequently curtailed his activities as a painter. Nevertheless, he has a growing reputation as an artist with an exquisite sense of colour and a great gift for design within his pictures. His new watercolours are inevitably slight and some of them give the impression of being hurried between parades, or possibly fatigues, but some display his qualities fully if only on a small scale. His drawing needs tightening up a little but otherwise the best of these watercolours, notably Nos. 5, 9, 21, 23, 31 and 34, are very much more than delightful. Like all his generation, Scott, and his wife, who shows some charming drawings in the same exhibition, show traces of Picasso's influence, but happily less, one imagines, than would have been the case if the import of the great Spaniard's work had not been curtailed during the war. That goes for most of us. To start these balls rolling again, now peace is here, the British Council has very creditably imported a selection of new Picassos and a more generally retrospective range of paintings by Matisse, covering a period of forty-four years. Some of these latter are in his most sumptuous manner and show his genius as a colourist, some are very recent and are not, I think, in the same clan as his earlier works. "La Femme au Tabouret " painted in 1912 is the chef d'auvre and Matisse at his most subtle and beautiful best. It is a picture almost entirely in delicate tones of grey. Picasso shows fewer but larger pictures covering the.period of the five war years which might as well have been done in five days. Many of these pictures are in dirty tones of grey, and most of them are several square feet in area. They are dated thus: February 26th, 5945 or August 9th, 5943. On August 9th, 1943, he seems to have had a busy day, since he produced two huge ones. On the credit side let us say at once, there are traces of savage, raw power such as he put into the studies for his famous " Guernica," and the man has not given up drawing. What he has given up is painting. Never a remarkable colourist, except in acknowledging his debt to Braque, he has now lost all apparent interest in colour. His pictures are now uniformly dune-coloured except for an occasional display of vulgarity in the primaries and his deplorable handling of the medium of paint reduces this to further nullity. Picasso has in fact ceased to practise oil painting as a craft, and any other medium would have done as well for these pictures, particularly that of glossy expensive reproduction. He is now engaged upon the intellectual activity of flogging his own clichés to death with one dirty brush. Of the two or three pictures which escape this category the big " Peche de nuit a Antibes " has pleasant colour and some of the old genius for design ; " Fenenetre a la tete de bceuf," dated April 3rd, 1942, also has quality, partly I suspect because he washed the brush on April 2nd.
As for the variations on the theme of " La Femme grise " I recom- mend a comparison with the Matisse " Femme au Tabouret " of thirty-three years before, hanging a few yards away. Picasso, giant that he is or was, has reduced himself " ad absurdam " to a carica- ture of " modernistic " art. He could have done no greater service
Previous page
