ART.
TWO PAINTER-SCULPTORS.
AMONGST English artists there is a growing fear at the increas- ing difficulty of selling their pictures. The artist, of course, should be the last person in the world to grumble at this state of affairs, dealing, as he does when he is sincere, in wares which have no reference to the public's needs, wants, or desires ; painting pictures with a degree of pleasure in self- expression, greater by far than that of the man who keeps rabbits or prize canaries as a hobby. The world seldom pays people for expressing themselves. Many good situations have been lost, indeed, because of this incontinent habit.
The artist should adopt an air of surprise, if only as a disguise to his egotism, when anyone shows the slightest inclination to possess one of his pictures. Nevertheless, the steady neglect of painting on the part of the purchasing public requires explanation.
Very few pictures are bought just because the purchaser likes them. A certain element of investment enters into the sale of most pictures. Recently, however, owing to the vast amount of experimental work that has been done, and because , of the reassessment of former worn-out but habitually accepted standards, the investment has become too much of a gamble. Another factor which has made possible buyers cautious and sceptical is due to the fact that many dealers, especially in Paris, have acquired, when prices were low, large stocks of particular painters' works and are now trying to work up an artificial" boom " to dispose of these works at a' profit. Then there is the Picasso fetish. Picasso is a painter - with keen sensibility ; has an analytical turn of mind but little power for synthesis. In his search for truth he has a. weakness for turning round every wrong corner he comes to, magnetically trailing behind him, like some Pied Piper, most of the advanced artists of Europe whom he ultimately leaves in the hole he has found for them, and dodging out by some secret exit, he, himself, resumes his adventurous career. His phases are many and each one has its following of artists, who require a lead and a precedent before they can depart from a naturalistic and dead academism which, on analysis, they -have found wanting. This draft, into England, of the results of the French predilection for unfocussed logic has left the buying public more bewildered than ever.
In the meantime there has sprung up in England a group of artists (each one working independently, of the others) 'Whose work, although influenced by the same undercurrents which have set the French Painters into long-distance flights of logic that have ended in disaster, contains a saner and more typically English solution of the problems involved, which were connected, in the main, with the purity and appro- priateness of the medium of expression. It cannot be said of this group that they are following any English tradition of painting. There is probably no such thing. But the time has arrived for us to realize that here in England there has arisen, without ostentation or the blowing of the horns of publicity, this little group which, with disdain for, and perhaps a fundamental inability to engage upon the highly involved abstract reasoning of the Continent, has, neverthe- less, arrived at a more truly logical solution of conscious art problems by the English tradition of thought—a progressive logical reasoning combined with a continual reference to reality.
Eric Kennington, with W. P. Roberts, the brothers Spencer, Wadsworth, Wyndham Lewis, Colin and Eric Gill, and many others, belongs to this group. There is a. permanence, cohesion, and conceptive vigour in his work which reduces criticism into descriptive phrases. The picture I like best at the Leicester Galleries is the painting of the Cactus (No. 19), with its feeling of growth and the struggle of growth—the poise of one part counteracted by the poise of another—the recovery of a complete equilibrium in the whole. His pictures are never manufactured designs con- forming to some preconceived formula. Each subject has stimulated him in a different way and led him to construct and create vitally and uniquely in every picture. The static trunk of the Palm (No. 23) bursts ,into stems which seem to spout forth swishing forms of leaves. The Aloe (No. 5) curls itself into a unified mastery of itself and the surrounding space. The variety of invention in his treatment of the trees in No. 21 is astonishing. Possessing such a fine sense-of form as he does it was bound to be said of him that he would ulti- mately devote himself to sculpture. To say that every real painter -would show himself competent in sculpture is not too sweeping a statement to make. The surprising thing about Kennington's work, however, is the thorough executive ability, and appreciation of every medium which it shows. His painting has all the expansive qualities Of good painting ; his drawings, when they are not studies for sculpture, show a sensitive awareness of the possibilities of line ; his sculpture has the centripetal quality that it ought to have. The hearth , figures in carved brick, Larrie and Penatie (Nos. 28 and 29), , combine the best elements of caricature with sculptural design. One is not sure whether the design has evolved the ' humour or the humour the design, so closely and cleverly are they knit together. Nos. 34 (A Maid) and 26 (The Bollard). are model essays in the treatment of metal. His memorial• to the 24th Division, which has been unveiled recently in Battersea Park is probably the best piece of sculpture of its kind that has been erected in England: It is interesting to notice that Frank Dobson, who has chiefly been known for his sculpture, now exhibits some water-colour drawings at the Independent Gallery. With the exit of the slick naturalistic picture from serious Art the old type of specialist in portraiture, landscape or still-life has automatically vanished from modern Art. Here we have a sculptor painting pictures which, in conception, are infinitely superior to most of the pictures that are being painted by artists who have been trained solely as painters. They are both original and vital in conception. It is unfor- tunate that Dobson's more serious sculpture cannot be seen at this exhibition,for he is one of the three or four outstanding
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