27 FEBRUARY 1953, Page 13

ART

Girtin, Rembrandt's Pupils and Others.

IT is a happy coincidence that brings so fine a loan exhibition of "poor Tom" Girtin's watercolours to Messrs. Agnew's (in aid of the National Art Collections Fund) at the same time as the Whitechapel Turners are on show. Comparison between the friends (they were born in the same year) is inevitable. During the last decade of the eighteenth century—that transitional point in landscape painting— it is Girtin who is the more impressive, with a fluency and simplicity in his treatment of the bare northern moorlands that Turner was not to reach until years later. What might not this tender and muted lyricism, so rapidly developing in its last two or three years, have become? This exhibition is a "must," if only for another glimpse of La Rue St. Denis.

At Matthiesen's, in aid of the Netherlands flood victims, is a second loan collection of great interest, this one designed to show the extent of the influence of Rembrandt upon his pupils. All his life Rembrandt had students about him, but increasingly, as his own grasp of light and form and character developed in grandeur, they felt themselves, so to speak, out of their depth. Among the paintings here, many from abroad, are works by Barent Fabritius, Lievens, Dou and Koninck.

The nineteenth- and twentieth-century pictures at the Marlborough Gallery include some important and affecting things. The Renoirs, even the young woman from the Vollard collection, are too sweet, too near the kitsch borderline, for my own taste, but there are some charming Boudina, Fantin-Latours, a gay Dufy, a turbulent Soutine landscape, two fine Utrillos, and a couple of early Picassos of Drawings, monotypcs and engravings (including a recent set of variations on the theme of Poe's Raven) by Mario Prassinos are to be seen at the Hanover Gallery. A romantic with surrealist affilia- tions, Prassinos embraces the idiomatic usages of Picasso and the School of Paris with gusto and a careless command. It is not a question of pastiche; this is simply the language natural to his generation. (Indeed, Prassinos is something of a technical inno- vator.) Rich and various, these are book-illustrations to hold their own in any company. The Bestiaire must challenge comparison with Picasso's Buffon aquatints.

At the same gallery is a second exhibition by Peter Foldes, who, it may be remembered, received international acclaim with his film Animated Genesis. His paintings, pitched in a high colour-key, have a glitter and a restless vitality that cannot fail to arrest. One senses at times an over-anxious determination to put all the goods in the shop-window, so that a too great elaboration of form and colour and texture leads to distraction, fatigue for the eye and a dissipation of power over every indiscriminate square inch of the canvas. Foldes' talent is undoubted, however, and, save in this respect, he is incapable of making any statement that is not couragous and positive. The big composition Contemporary Scene, incidentally, looks better here than it did at the R.B.A. galleries recently. considerable interest, together with a small but splendidly rich still-life dating from 1938.

Of the younger contemporary talents on show, the exhibition by Roy Turner Durrant, at the Parsons Gallery, will be closed by the time this appears. Durrant's part geometric, part organic, idiom is always expressed in a painterly manner that is pleasantly sensuous to the eye. His curious flying machines are images that remain in the mind.

M. H. MIDDLETON.