ART
RETURNING to Bond Street after some weeks in Italy is a rather chastening experience. Inevitably one muses upon the Puritan tradi- tion of the Protestant countries, which, to the regret of other painters both before and after Reynolds, " thought it proper to exclude pic- tures from their churches." Of particular interest, therefore, did I find Graham Sutherland's_ preliminary studies for the Northampton Crucifixion (it will be remembered that a commission from the same source resulted in one of Henry Moore's most completely successful works) which have been on view at the Lcfevre Gallery. These derive, not from the externalised art of the Mediterranean, but the introversions and introspections of the north, the bitter contortions of Grunwald and the Flemish and Germanic painters. Sutherland himself says—as may have been guessed by many—that the thorn %.-as his starting point. He became interested in the positive and negative shapes made by thorn trees grappling with the sky, and then with the symbolic quality of their needle-sharp profusion. Although a new hardness and rigidity made itself felt in these pantheistic explora- tions, they were but a simple extension of his previous work, in which the pictorial form arose directly and organically from within the form and nature of the subject itself.
In these studies for the Crucifixion, however, one senses an effort to impose upon the subject from -without an intellectual-emotional conception. The inevitability of Sutherland's best work is thus destroyed. The hieratic quality is emphasised by the manner in which the theme is placed before a series of flat and almost unrelated backgrounds. Sutherland has never --xcelled in covering large areas with flat colour, but the casual and rather unpleasant quality of these is presumably due to a determination not to concoct sweetmeats out of so vast an agony. For, cruelly distorted, this is all humanity upon the cross. Here is the utmost violence of suffering. Is, then, this brave attempt to recreate religious painting in contemporary terms, with passion and integrity, successful? These are only the pre- liminary studies, through which one can study the growth of an idea. You must go to Northampton to study the idea in its final form.
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Two Frenchmen have been exhibiting during the last month. At the Anglo-French Art Centre Gabriel Couderg shows a series of lusty, breezy, semi-Cubist pictures, suffused with the strong colour of the Mediterranean and a southern cheerfulness. His gusto is infectious, but his complete lack of profundity is disconcerting. At the St. George's Gallery Andre Beaudin provides .a- striking contrast. Here there is a great deal of taste and a complete absence of over- statement. As to whether there is anything more I am dubious. For the policy pursued by such galleries, however (and the St. George's hopes to give us a whole series of similar exhibitions of work by the younger generation abroad), one must be more than grateful. With the existing import conditions prohibiting sales, it is a policy of pure
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