ART
A MIXED week. At Wildenstein's a memorial exhibition of Thomas Lowinsky's curious talent. Too late for one movement, Lowinsky yet contrived to forestall another and, embedded as he was in the English tradition of linear illustration, to link a bejewelled Pre- Raphaelitism to a wan Surrealism. These and other affinities—chief among them perhaps Gustave Moreau and Botticelli—are gently disparaged in a catalogue note by Sir Francis Meynell, who was one of the first to press into service Lowinsky's admirably considered book decorations, the open tines of which accord most happily with the text settings. As a painter, however, he had a lack of feeling for his medium, and, one would guess, a certain lack of courage, which produced a primness of delineation ; and this, however singular, was of a minor order and too often perished for lack of direct observation.
* * * * Paul Nash, a room full of whose drawings and paintings may be seen at the Redfern, was Lowinsky's almost exact contemporary. Similarly he restricted his colon' and sought a poetry of associations. Nash looked outwards, though, as well as inwards, and an elegiac mode, by sitting more lightly Upon him, became more deeply affecting. Frederick Gore, whose recent landscapes and figure studies are in an adjoining room, looks steadily outwards in a cheery, extrovert way. Like Nash, he has borrowed some superficial post-Cubist mannerisms with which to strengthen his work, but the cantabile of Nash's colour he has replaced with a fortissimo and a gusty joy in immediate splendours.
* * * * A masculine commonplace has it that there never was a woman painter yet. Nevertheless women have currently usurped three galleries. Gimpel's offer oils and watercolours by the Turkish painter Fahrunissa Zeid. Though these lean more obviously towards the abstract than the work she has previously shown, the essentials remain the same. The fragmentation which characterises even her most realistic ventures is here pushed to a point of all-over patterning that owes a great deal to contemporary Paris both in colour and manner. Buffie Johnson, the American painter at the Hanover Gallery, has a sense of paint, discretion and a measure of originality in the semi-abstract vein of Surrealism she works. I could not resist an impression, however, of a European vision having been taken over and furbished up with a certain New World efficiency.
* * At the St. George's Gallery, Paule Vezelay, the English painter who has lived in Paris these twenty years and more, shows abstracts compounded of crescents and spikes, comets and shooting stars. She has a nice judgement, and, when she allows it, a pleasant enough colour sense. Though her work is not powerful, it is decorative, and pure, and likable. At the same gallery Mary Krishna uses the basic elements of John Piper's technique for bolder and less sensitive effects than his.
Among the other exhibitions worth noting is a most interesting collection at the R.W.S. Gallery of drawings and carvings by African boys, produced at Cyrene in Southern Rhodesia under the guidance of Edward Paterson. At the Leicester Galleries a reduced London Group accompanies a small mixed New Year show. Which was
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