ART
AUGUSTUS JOHN has chosen to exhibit his latest work, not at Burling- ton House, but at the Leicester Galleries. This, his first one-man show for a good many years, includes a large decorative grisattle entirely typical of its author. It is a romantic figure composition set, one presumes, in the Celtic hinterland, and embracing, here some fragments with all the immediacy of direct observation, there some elements of eclectic affectation as far removed from life as might be imagined. Did the same brush really paint the hands of the main figure as painted the symbolical approximation belonging to the woman on the ground below? As far as I was concerned neither the forced unity of monochrome nor the force of John's poetic imagination was sufficient to fuse the disparate components of this picture. Many of the recent portraits here are no more than over- sweet masks, expressly designed to flatter the sitter, but at intervals one comes upon the genuine John—a flashing record of form in- tensely observed and character subtly romanticised. Consider the sensuous delicacy of the semi-transparent-pigment of a painting like Henry in Moorish Costume ; this is a final, satisfying and exciting statement. Also to be seen at the Leicester Galleries are some of Roger Furse's designs for the Hamlet film. These were probably excellent visualisations for the architects and technicians, but except for one or two of the costume designs, they are mostly very poor drawings.
* * * * At the Lefevre Gallery is a big exhibition of paintings by S. J. Peploe, who was born seven years before Augustus John and who died in 1935. The late Alexander Reid held that Hunter, Fergusson to dismiss Peploe's work as a peripheral aspect of Parisian post- and Peploe were the only colourists in. Britain, and though it is easy impressionism, the best of it has an integrity, a strength and a splendour of colour that raise it above insignificance. Peploe's feeling for colour is not especially obvious in the current exhibition, but the Franco-Scottish feeling for paint is there, and the respect for the limitations of a small but steady flame. • * * *
Tristram Hillier is holding his first show for a couple of years at Messrs. Tooth's. The majority of the paintings are small, and seem somewhat repetitive en masse, but the larger compositions, so carefully worked out, are good samples of the Hillier craftsmansnip. His weakened and very sane brand of near-surrealism is reminiscent of much contemporary American painting. For those who find it a little too chromium-plated in colour 4ind texture, the exhibition includes a number of drawings.
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Among the other galleries let me recommend the Adams, where a collection of French paintings is on view—none of them of the very front rank, but nearly all enjoyable ; the little St. George's Gallery where, besides some intensely Jewish sculptures by Mosheh Oved, may be seen a small collection of Austrian drawings—quite a novelty in London and the more welcome because of it ; and finally the Berkeley Galleries in Davies Street, which are showing paintings and sculpture by Ben Enwonwu, a young Nigerian who has been studying in London. Over the paintings we will draw a discreet veil. The sculpture, however, although it attempts to soften traditional West African techniques with a gloss of European sophistication, is more than mere pastiche. Half-a-dozen pieces seemed to me most sensitively felt and full of promise. I hope we shall not lose sight of Mr. Enwonwu when he returns to Africia, for his development may
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