ART
The Re-opening of the Tate.
THE six elegantly redecorated rooms containing the multiple exhibition which marks the. re-opening of the Tate firmly under- line the recent and rapid decay of painting in Paris. The magnifi- cent pick of the Tate's own collection of nineteenth-century French pictures which fill Room I and the Arts Council's splendidly chosen group of fifty-seven Cezanne water-colours in Room II—an exhibi- tion one would go far to see .by itself—are of a distinction beside which the contents of the third room look unimportant, end, in the case of Braque, merely decorative. Braque and Rouault, whose
• works fill this third and central hall, are unevenly served, through no fault of the British Council. Twenty-five new Braques from Paris, most of them large and lent by the artist, face a wall of Rouaults which, were it not powerfully aided by tho hasty inclusion of several of his early works from English collections, would look like the pickings of a concierge employed to salvage from the great man's wastebin. In my view, Rouault is incomparably the greatest living artist, and it is sad that Paris should have seen fit to send only four very small examples of his best painting, Nos. 31, 32, 33 and 34 respectively, together with fifteen near-duds and a selection of prints which, though magnificent, are already familiar to the British audience. A really fine collection of his gouaches and oils would have stood up even to Cezanne. The contributions from London serve to give the visitor some idea of Rouault's tragic power, but they neither fully represent his development, nor do they hang as a successful group.
In the introduction to the catalogue, M. Germain Bazin works himself into a fine fury about the possible lack of comprehension which may greet the new pictures by Braque. He speaks of " young barbarians " expressing scorn of Braque's " delicate images," and he makes great play with historical parallels and (if the word is permissible) iconopatriotic assertions. Now this is the sort of stuff I write myself about British art, and I write it because I believe England is just about to emerge from a century of pictorial mediocrity into a period of great painting, and that this fact should be shouted from roof-tops. To find a Frenchman, whose nation's art has been firmly in the European saddle for a century of undisputed
• supremacy, writing this rabble-rousing rhetoric about an established master is disconcerting, to say the least. Disconcerting and instruc- tive, for the fact of the matter is that these new Braques are neither incomprehensible nor good. They display the same lack of interest in the medium of paint and the same tendency to paint what should be small pictures on a large scale as did the new Picassos last year. For Braque of all people to discard the painterly virtues is the one incomprehensible aspect of his exhibition. The forms are basically unchanged, the drawing remains occasionally exciting, but the exquisite sense of paint texture and design which made the 1920-30 Braques so delicious is gone ; 'destroyed by that dreadful com- placency which makes so much recent French painting a mere matter of slap and daub.
It would give me great personal satisfaction, after the foregoing censures, if I could acclaim Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Massey's collec- tion of contemporary English paintings as an obvious indication of the coming renaissance of English art. With the best will in the world, I cannot feel that this particular exhibition is strong enough to carry that conviction. There are fine pictures in it, but on the whole it does not contain the best work of those artists represented. Sutherland and Frances Hodgkins, two of our finest artists, come out of it particularly badly ; and among the numerous Paul Nashes only The Vale of the White Blackbird shows his true quality. On the credit side, the David Jones drawing is lovely and Victor Pasmore's Evening, Hammersmith, is one of his most successful pictures. There is one superb Matthew Smith, a pretty fair Stanley Spencer and a delicate William Nicholson still life, which is curiously reminiscent of Braque. Should M. Braque visit the show, I recom- mend that he look at it (it is No. 43 in the catalogue) and be himself reminded. The whole collection is respectable, conservative and curiously lacking in the personality of the collector. It creates the feeling of having been chosen by a committee. In the last room is a fascinating selection of nineteenth-century English painting which repays study, but which space precludes me from treating in detail. As one goes back inevitably to the wonderful first room of nineteenth-century French masterpieces, through the Cezanne water- colour room, past the second-rate Braques, and arrives at the con- temporary English pictures, the whole exhibition seems to illustrate a decline from greatness ; but something hopeful in the show of our own second- and third-rank artists indicates that it is only a transi- tion, and that France has actually given us back the impetus we ourselves gave her a century age. It now remains to be seen what
Previous page
