ART AFTER the excesses of the Fauve and Expressionist movements
in their decadence, a return to precision was to be expected, and in various forms—Neue Sachlichkeit, surrealism and American " magic " social realism—has in fact taken place. In this climate a new appraisal of nineteenth-century painting becomes possible and inevitable. We must expect the trivia and mock heroics of high Victorianism to be elevated from the depths to which they sank a quarter of a century ago. To the Whitechapel Art Gallery has come the Harrogate Festival exhibition of Frith, one of the most sympathetic of his generation because least pompous. It is a .good exhibition—the first of its kind to be assembled—and comprehensive enough to challenge a new judgement. I have tried, and confess that I was unable to budge him an inch either way in my estimation. Frith insisted on remaining exactly where he stood before. He could be a good painter when his interest was aroused, and there are passages of delight in many of his pictures, but oh the dreary wastes of tedium in those plodding backgrounds ! He was a careful and more than competent producer of crowd scenes, but in a curiously all-over manner which lacks the force and focal points of greater compositions. He was industrious, but lacking in taste (those high- lights are as disturbing as in Lawrence and how greatly inferior are some of the replicas to which he signed his name !). Posterity will always remain grateful that Frith chose the path of doau- mentation rather than Landseer's " slosh " (the description is not mine but Edward Lear's), but his descriptions lack the intensity of the -poetic eye. Social realism finds a place under the London Group's all sheltering aegis at the New Burlington Galleries. The Group con.- inues to show an astonishing, and amongst exhibiting societies lmost unique, power of self-renewal—almost to the point where 3ne could wish for a shade less determination to keep so doggedly :open a mind I Here at least the academic and experimental still go hand in hand. There are several surprises at the show, and an ndoubted movement towards greater abstraction. Anthony Gross, ulian Trevelyan and William Scott are three who have moved 1 arkedly in this direction, and even Ruskin Spear, in his view of festival lights on the river, has pushed his usual vision to a point here it has become something different in kind. Matthew Smith's still life and reliefs by Paolozzi and Bernard Meadows are worth ooking out for. Notwithstanding the show's undoubted liveliness, found the mechanical efficiency with which the younger painters lave taken over the idioms of their elders somewhat disquieting.
M. H. MIDDLETON.
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