I Quiet Assault ,.. IN recent years we have been ..
. accustomed to a pattern in the one- , man shows by young artists at the Beaux Arts Gallery—and else- where for that matter. Every twelve or eighteen months the walls must be filled with large pictures in many of which the paint is still tacky. Execution and appreciation has been a quick affair. Such shows have often had a kind of false finality as if art's last word had been spoken. They have been fifty- gallon drums containing about a pint and a half of fuel and a swirl of gases under low compres- sion. Michael Andrews's first show at the Beaux Arts is a very different matter. The modest num- ber of paintings and drawings has been made during six years and include some things from his student time at the Slade; one or two have already made a very noticeable appearance in mixed shows. The total exhibition gives an impression of being exploratory, but so intensely charged is each work, so purposive seems the painter's attitude that no doubt occurs as to whether they should have been brought before the public.
I reviewed one of them—Some People .Sun- bathing—when it was at the ICA two years ago; it has stayed distinctly and persuasively in the mind's eye ever since, not simply as a general expression of an attitude, a temperament, or a style, but as one complex and developed image with its own life. His finest picture to. date, a portrait of Lorenza Mazzetti with the Spanish Steps as a background—and words are surpris- ingly inadequate to describe pictures whose allusions and ambiguities might seem superficially to be amenable to literary explanation—this por- trait also seems the more remarkable and solid upon a second viewing. Both these pictures with their fastidious tonality,, their strict though not consistent realism, their reticent surface and colour, present an individual, a very individual, variant upon the methods of Euston Road art. Recently the handling of the pigment has become more demonstrative and the pictorial structure in consequence looser; I do not find any of them to have quite the same power as the two I have
already mentioned, but they are all and variously rewarding.
Andrews's work has rightness of scale excep- tional for the times; one would not wish his paint- ings to be larger or smaller, and in fact their particular size is not noticeable. What the paint contains and expresses is always more interesting than the pigment itself, one fact which accounts for their efficacy. Every one of them represents a quiet assault upon a large pictorial problem of one kind or another. In two strange pictures called Liony Piony this means making plausible and not absurd, serious and not trivial, alive and not dead, a situation which would seem to be hopelessly out of the question in the mid-twentieth century and was seldom conquered in the nineteenth—the relationship between a human figure and a wild animal.This is a fine beginning for the New Year and for a painter's public career.
BASIL TAYLOR
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