27 DECEMBER 1946, Page 12

ART MANY Londoners will recall the exhibition of primitive art

which was organised last year by the Berkeley Galleries. I missed it myself, and was therefore especially interested to visit a second, and more important, exhibition which is now on view at the same address. I am not qualified to interpret the ethnological aspects of this remark- able collection, but I found many of the exhibits, judged merely on their formal qualities, of the highest interest. The first objectives of art were magical, and the impetus given to the design of the masks and totem poles, figures and fetishes of primitive peoples by their communal ritualistic and ceremonial purposes has often released a power and vitality which have been suppressed in more complex civilisations by the exercise of the intellect. Which, of course, has now been recognised for at least half a century, since Picasso, Modigliani, Klee and the rest first attempted to tap some of that power for more sophisticated ends. Most of the objects at the Berkeley Galleries come from Africa and the South Seas. It seemed to me that, amongst many others, the two-faced mask from the Camaroons (No. 34), a couple of the carved seats, the figure of a woman from the Sudan (No. r4), some of the totem poles and the large ancestral figure from the Easter Islands were par- ticularly noteworthy. The Javanese articulated cut-outs for shadow plays, twopenny coloured on one side for the male members of the audience and penny plain on the other for the ladies, were something quite new to me.

These native qualities of primitive art are entirely lacking in the first exhibition of Jamaican painting, which is to be seen at Messrs. Foyle's art gallery. That these pictures are firmly in the Western convention, however, is due not to slavish imitation, but to the general permeation of the West Indies with European and American culture, for the artists represented are not only self-taught but are unable, in many cases, to read or write. It is to be expected that the next stage, before a more complex and genuinely native art arises; will mirror the worst aspects of academic traditionalism. Huie and Palmer seem to be the most accomplished painters, but I found the most interesting the genuinely naive Dunckley, whose work is akin, in some respects, to that of Blake and his school. At the Legez Galleries canvases by Guignebert and Lagrange may be seen by those who were unable or unwilling to make the pilgrimage to St. John's Wood, where they were previously on view at the Anglo-French Art Centre. Both these painters are associated with the tapestry revival so largely engineered by Lurcat—some of the pictures on show have been translated into the other medium— and the influence of Lurcat may be noted in some of the paintings by Lagrange. For the most part, however, his restrained and subtle still-lifes of kitchenware are quite individual, and all his work is carefully composed and constructed. The symbolic cock, which is so much in evidence in all French painting of the last few years, appears in Guignebert's work, among the flayed heads and convulsed portraits. Personally, I find myself congenitally incapable of appreciating these regurgitations of Van Gogh, Picasso and Soutine. A third exhibition of comparative interest was that of Roop and Mary Krishna's drawings and paintings at India House, in the Aldwych. Roop's work appears to me like that of an Indian trying to paint in the European manner ; Mary's like that of a European trying to paint in the Indian manner. She has a natural fluency and facility, however, that are appealing, and though the large oils are pure pastiche of blue-period Picasso, some of her line drawings of animals and some of her drawings of puppets have great rhythmic