24 JUNE 1960, Page 15

Painting

Oceanographer

By SIMON HODGSON

Mr. Nolan, in his new pictures of Leda and the Swan at Matthiesen's Galleries, is immediately interesting as a craftsman, a craftsman, that is, of the experimenting, exploring kind. This is an enormously exciting exhibition both for Mr. Nolan's admirers and for those who are in- terested in any extension of the range of oil painting, and what is above all else important is that the images emerge from the medium, or from the use of the medium rather; they are not arbitrary statements that the medium must comprehend as best it can. The paint is rolled, rubbed, sponged, streaked, it streams over the canvas like sea over shadowy coloured depths: Leda's body and the pursuing and sinuous swan do not stand out separately but emerge in the flow of the paint. All of these pictures are full of broad movement that is never too busy and which is never aimless, and therefore never dull. li may be, however, that the large paintings tail in some respects. For one thing their surface has a sticky brilliance and a sweetness of colour that, to my mind. detract from their somnambulist and sober poetry This is not true in all cases, but the small oils, painted on paper, are all suc- cessful, subtler in colour, and even more con- vincing in their imagery.

It is in the figurative element that Mr. Nolan's development is most marked. Gone are Ned Kelly and Mrs. Fraser, gone Bracefell and the palpable personae of the outback. The story has progressed beyond the personal courage and private revolts of individuals into a region where people, de-humanised, as Mr. Spender's intro- duction says, exist only in, and as part of the ebb and flux of slow-moving. stately, inexorable natural forces. These forces, I have suggested. are exactly represented by the use of medium which Mr Nolan has adopted, and adapted for the purpose. What then of the mythmaker the inventor of images, the illustrator? Here the artist is less interesting and less urgent. It has been usual to talk of surrealism in connection with his work, but the poetic searches of that school are far from the mood visible in these works, which require no explanation for the symbols used, and which are so obviously un- specific. In fact the symbols provided by the myth are pegs on which to hang, not anecdotes of some imaginary heroic progression but an abstract, and poetic certainly, feeling for nature and the world Leda is unimportant, that is to say, but for the shifting grandeur of her watery universe. These paintings are figurative only in a strictly emotional sense. But the painting, the creation through technique of a whole range of sensation, new yet at once vividly open to ex- perience, is something indeed.

At Wildenstein's a sixteenth-century painting from Antwerp, a Goya sketch, and some un- pleasing French eighteenth-century pictures are dominated by a Cdzanne so intense that despite its small size it echoes through the room, an enormous Vuillard, and a large and extremely strange Bonnard. The Vuillard is perhaps too dull round the edges, that is, in the interior of the room, but the sunlit garden seen through the french windows is one of those apercus which place us in this artist's debt for ever; beautifully painted, it demonstrates that visual joy lies all around us. and that Vuillard was a great painter through his ability to fix such moments, immuvable, unchangeable as one whole in our mind's eye, as a perfect and eternai second if felicity, complete and comprehensible in its en- tirety A rare gift The Bonnard at first sight is a brutish and cumhersome painting A nude woman (with cropped hair) is slumped in a oust), track, with, • hove anu oetow ner. trees and grass painted in colours as vivid (and bear- ing very little relation to the flesh colours) as a Liberty silk. Look again! What of the extra- ordinary painting of the body, what of the com- mand of the shoulder and arm that loom toward the spectator; what of the cool, muted shadows on the nude reflecting, but more quietly, the hectic abundance of colour round about?