CONTEMPORARY ARTS
ART
THE London Group has claimed for itself an unusual generosity this year, in allotting two- thirds of the hanging-space at the Nor Burlington Galleries to non-members. In actual fact only five more non-members than last year are exhih:ting and the general tenor of the exhibition is much as usual. For some little time now the Group's shows have given the impression .of hardening into a formula—we know before entering the exact spo$. where Mary Martin's relief will be (it has been there for three years now), whereabouts we shall find a Trevelyan (last year it was No. 24, this year it is No. 23) or a Paul Feller (permanent guardian to the entrance to the corridor). To expect other- wise would perhaps be unfair. The Group's strength—its steadfast refusal to enter the world of art politics—is inevitably its weak- ness and its confusion, and its hanging com- mittees are faced every year with an unenvi- able task. From such a diversity of idiom can emerge no more coherent impression than a sort of corporate denial of Wyndham Lewis's assertion in his new book, The Demon of Progress in the Arts, that 'there is no painting today worthy of consider- ation between extremist painting and the Royal Academy.' if there is a shift of emphasis in this year's exhibition, its is brought about by Messrs. Eric Atkinson, Frederick Brill, Derrick Greaves and Jack Smith and results from these young painters' determination to equate their 'realism' with that abomination the 'exhibition picture.' To some degree all four are being forced into a particular form of self-advertisement which has hitherto tended to be the prerogative of artists of other persuasions, and this, as always, is a pity. The notable exception is Frederick Brill's painting of a grey, striated cliff-face washed by a grey, white-foamed sea, which warrants its size by the firmness of its con- struction and the conviction of its vision. It would be a good purchase for the Con- temporary Art Society.
* * At the Victoria and Albert Museum the Circulation Department has organised what is claimed to be the first international exhibi- tion of colour wood- and lino-cuts. The 200-odd prints come from 130 artists in 25 countries (Mexico, a land with a powerful and lively graphic tradition, is an odd omission). Several eastern European coun- tries have contributed, and There are selections from both China and Japan. Great Britain is represented by entries received for the Giles Bequest Fund competitions since 1950. Vik's panorama of Prague, and Arnold Gross's landscape from Hungary—an aston- ishing performance which suggests wood- engraving rather than lino. From the west, notably from Switzerland, come abstracts of every sort. It is noticeable that while the Chinese prints stick to a delicate realism (for example, buses, lorry and breakdown van on a Peking Suburban Highway), Japanese woodcutters seem to have swallowed American abstraction of the crudest kind, hook, line and sinker. Germany, Scandinavia and the USA are particularly well represented; among individual prints which stay in the memory are those by F. Tidemand- Johannessen and Paul Rene Gauguin (Norway), Voitto Vikainen (Finland), Mino Maccari (Italy), Walter Battiss (South Africa), Riko Debenjak (Yugoslavia), H. P. Doebele (Holland).
M. H. MIDDLETON
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