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A STEP-LADDER TO PAINTING By Jan Gordon The type of handbook designed to help the young artist through the early stages of his training tends to be dull and dreary as literature. Mr. Jan Gordon was evidently deter- mined that his handbook,• A Step-ladder to Painting (Faber and Faber, 7s. 6d.) should avoid this particular failing, and he has done everything possible to make it lively. He does not pontificate nor lay down an elaborate spiritual regime which the beginner must follow if he is to win salvation and avoid damnation. On the contrary, he delivers many attacks on the severe and unbending methods followed by art schools in general, and he aims at showing that the entry into art is neither so onerous nor so disagreeable as is usually thought. So, for instance, he encourages the study of still-life and land- , scope independently of a master rather than the dismal attendance at the nude elass against the student's will. On such matters as these Mr. Gordon is full of stimulating hints, though his habit of illustrating every point by an anecdote tends to become monotonous, and at moments in avoiding pomposity he slips into heartiness and even toughness. The passages on drawing, colour and the analysis of tone values are also of great practical utility, but on the subject of com- position Mr. Gordon is on more dangerous ground. By a series of ingenious diagrams he seeks to show that well-com- posed paintings usually obey certain almost geometrical laws ; that the lines of arms and legs, circles drawn through groups of heads, axes of trees and so on all intersect so happily that the picture in the end is nothing but a set of Golden Sections. But surely this method is rather Baconian ; or, to put it another way, it is like that Evangelical pamphlet published some years ago proving that all the dimensions of St. Peter's were either multiples or sub-multiples of the Number of the Beast, 666, and that if you substitute numbers for the letters the name of the present Pope produces a similar result. In these cases, in order to get the right result you have always to take the right approximation, and so, in the case of the paintings, do you have to draw the lines in the diagram. Each process has also another disadvantage. It is quite easy to prove that the word Jehovah is a factor of 666 just as much as the name of the Pope, and one feels confident that with a little trouble it would be possible to reduce the most manifestly bad composition to a mass of Golden Sections, or show that the noblest of Rembrandts contained none at all.
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