17 MAY 1946, Page 12

ART

WHILE the London scene is dominated, at either extreme, by the exhibitions at the Tate and the Royal Academy, a number of other galleries will, repay a visit. Messrs. Tooth are showing paihtings by Mr. Tristram Hillier, the earliest of which is dated 1935, the most recent 1946. No chance here for a guessing game, however, for the properties with which he furnishes his cliffs and quays— the boats and anchors, pebbles and pylons, flags and fishing nets, which he has inherited via Mr. Wadsworth from Pierre Roy— remain remarkably constant. His precise handling of paint, too, shows little change. Where Roy's objects are delineated with love and affection and Wadsworth's with an eye to their plastic possi- bilities, Mr. Hillier's remain strangely impersonal, so that one feels at times that the near-Surrealist stock of bric-à-brac has become a little shop-soiled and has degenerated into an evasion, while in some cases it seems to me insufficiently related in a formal sense. His technical facility, however, is very considerable—note, for example, the subtle tensions of the red-robed figure in No. 16: Bruneval—and when he allows his own painterly qualities to show through the formula, his pictures have a real attraction. To my mind he is most successful when least aggressive. His low tones seem more suited to the dreamlike disquiet he seeks to convey than the strident reds and blues of local colour which not infre- quently appear. A mixed bag of contemporary painters is to be seen at the Brook Street Galleries, including Sicken, Matthew Smith, Christopher Wood and Ethel Walker. Of the younger men, Felix Kelly is represented by a delicate topographical oil, while William Crosbie, whose name was hitherto unknown to me, shows an ambitious pic- ture which suggests that his development may be of interest. Leonard Rosoman, who during the earlier part of the war showed himself to be the most gifted of the Firemen Artists, was subse- quently commissioned as an official war artist and sent to the Far East with the Pacific Fleet. Some of his more recent work, dating from this period, may be seen at the St. George's Gallery. Those qualities of vision and paint which marked his earlier pictures are once more in evidence, while his colour sense has developed and matured to produce a number of rich harmonies.

M. H. MIDDLETON.