ART
The Leicester Galleries
IF Michael Ayrton would persuade himself that painting is not all a matter of self-expression, and that humility is as important a quality in a painter as talent itself, his work would gain much in interest. But he would have to decide that it is as important to look as it is to invent. If you continue to paint out of your head your work may get more complete, more elaborate, and more ac- complished; and if you live now, and are young (as Mr. Ayrton does and is) it will get smarter and neater, and more arbitrary' but it will not get more interesting. There is an end to invention from inside, and it comes soon. When it does come there is nothing for it but repetition, or a personal revolution ; and the revolution is in this case the thing to be hoped for. If he would look outside himself, and paint, for a time some bad, unpresentable pictures- -unlike the present ones, which are highly presentable of their kind—there would be every hope for his future as a painter ; for talent is a thing he certainly does not lack. John Minton shows with him, and they collaborated recently on the settings for Gielgud's Macbeth. The designs are included in the exhibition.
In the next room four other painters prpvide an acute contrast. Thomas Carr and Anthony Devas show a respectable humility in landscapes and portraits • Graham Bell and Lawrence Gowing show an excess of it. This humility is partly natural and partly scholastic ; nourished by the consciousness of Cezarnie's laudable terror of com- mitting himself by a definite statement on a bare canvas, and by a distaste for the assertiveness of the more arrogant, subjective fol- lowers of Picasso. These painters (especially Gowing and Graham Bell) would lead us back to pre-Picasso pure painting at its most selective and ratiocinative—and a very good idea, too, if the only other road was that of aggressive self-expression. But there is a native style that has as much force, and is full of desirable English impurities—desirable, that is, for an English painter—such as story- telling, descriptiveness, "raciness," and drama. In these paintings the English characteristics are not always excluded, and they are the richer when they are not. Gowing's large Portrait of a Lady is a highly respectable painting in the adopted mode. The small study for it (if it is a study for it) is less thoughtful, more painterly, and more likeable. And his small woodland scenes, and Graham Bell's view of a London square, and two views of Dublin, have all the more life because they are warmed by poetry and
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