ART
TT seems appropriate that Mr. Wyndham Lewis should be followed at the Redfern Gallery by Mr. Michael Ayrton, for in their interests, as in their approach to painting, these representatives of succeeding generations have much in common. Mr. Ayrton's partial withdrawal from the marginal hurly-burly of criticism has meant nothing but gain for his painting. His new exhibition reveals an outlook more unified and integrated than any previous collection has done. Gone are the sometimes uneasy experiments borrowed from English romanticism of the more fashionable kind. What is left—a curious marriage of Mediterranean subject-matter with bitter, northern terms 7r--seems to me the real and essential Ayrton, seen for the first time in controlled maturity. He has drawn for his drama upon the vine- yards of Italy, and twisted them by a trick of double vision into parables of Calvary. It is as though Griinewald were seen through the eyes of Gris. Ayrton flies high, with the result that a picture which does not come off becomes a contrived and pretentious conceit. But within their chosen' limits I think these new paintings do come off, and with an assurance that is new also. Useless to decry them for what they are not. Their colour, for example, is often a super- ficial addition without plastic value, the paint sometimes insensitively applied but then it is the linear tensions of the silhouette, the uneasy mood of some cerebral concept, which Ayrton is seeking to convey. Certainly his most successful pictures to date are here. In addition to the series I have mentioned, The Franciscan and The Approaching Storm are noteworthy in their various ways.
M. H. MIDDLETON.
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