ART
BILkoua's graphic work—the greater part intended as book , i not large in volume. It consists of some fifty prints, mostly The and etched, executed over a period of forty-odd years. T_he matt density of the dull grape-purples and sad olive-greens in the colour prints are intensely personal, but they cannot, inevitably, compare with the sensuous, succulent, tactile qualities and the full refinement of the colour harmanies to be found in almost any oil by Braque. The selection of prints at Gimpel Fils (not unfortunately fully representative—one of the artist's woodcuts, for example, would have been welcome) may best be taken as a gloss upon his oeuvre as a whole, and one which, in its very simplicity, may serve to shed light on the essential qualities of this most conscientious, contemplative and sweet-natured of painters.
Braque is not a natural draughtsman. He has said himself : " I have a heavy hand, which does not easily trace a contour. Whenever I begin doing a drawing, it turns into a painting—with hatching, shading and ornament." The line and the contour have always been an integral part of his visual thinking—but it is not the draughtsman's line. On the one hand the 1912 drypoint Fox (which was the name of a bar in Paris near St. Lazare) is built up slowly and methodically of cubist bricks and scaffolding. On the other, the post-war Helios series, of a neo-classical charioteer, began as a wiry outline in black, but rapidly developed into a series of exercises in tone and colour. Braque's line, which first found its full freedom in the engraved plaster slabs he made in 1930, serves formal ends. It expresses no inner conflict, no vibrancy of living tissue but the equilibrium of a solved equation. • « • « If Braque's energy has more often been turned to still-life than to the human figure, nevertheless, like Chardin's before him, his domestic bric-a-brac is visibly warmed by human affection. The theme of a teapot and lemon, lovingly recorded with the utmost simplicity, links this exhibition with the exciting lucky dip that is the Ben Uri Gallery's coronation offering in Portman Street, for a small oil of the subject by Braque is included there. This is a loan exhibition, with no other unity than that the works were chosen by their collector-owners. It is of great interest, however—first, because it has brought forth more German works than are usually to be seen in London (the most important of recent shows of German Expressionism was organised and seen in York) and it is novel to see Matthew Smith and Augustus John and Jacob Epstein, all of whom are very well represented here, in competition with their German as well as their French contemporaries. Second, because there are several individual surprises—headed by an early Van Gogh still-life, painted in a heavy impasto and glazed with more resonant colours than he was wont to use until.the last years of his life. Third, simply because the general level of the exhibition is high. It would be impossible to list the artists to be seen here, but I remember, haphazardly, a Guys drawing of a woman, a Rouault landscape, Lieberman's self-portrait, the Monet view of the Thames, a Dufy view across Paris, a 1938 Picasso and things by Boudin, Manet, Modigliani, Ehrlich, Adler, Pougny and Clay& M. H. MIDDLETON.
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