ART
THOSE who saw some of Mary Krishna's work at India House recently will know that she is a deft and competent draughtsman with a flair for drawing animals. The bulls and monkeys she is now showing at the St. George's Gallery, though simply handled, have considerable vitality and understanding. Mary Swanzy, at the same gallery, is less easy to describe, for she is one of those trying people who disconcert the critics by refusing to be neatly pigeon-holed. Mr. Eric Newton, in a catalogue note, has compared her to Dickens, and she has, indeed, something of Dickens's full- blooded approach to life and a contempt for purist fmickings. Traces of the Paris in which she studied remain in her distortions, but she discards the more succulent, " painterly " qualities of French art as unnecessary to her purpose. It is the idea, the anecdote, the social comment which captivate her, and these she expresses (in little pictures small enough to be noteworthy at a time when paint- ings are often " blown-up " to a size out of all proportion to their content) with a gusto that brings her near to caricature, and which could be found nowhere save in the land that produced Hogarth and Rowlandson.
* * * * Miss Prtmella Clough's exhibition at the Leger Galleries is, I believe, her first. It should not be overlooked. As yet her work remains derivative, and reveals many of the more acceptable mannerisms of Nash, Colquhoun and the younger romantics, but its more gentle and feminine colour lends it a personal distinction. Miss Clough disposes her material in depth particularly happily, with a certainty of scale and ease of composition that are disarming. I found these paintings delightful. Mr. Walter Nessler, at the same galleries, does not always seem quite certain what he wants to do, but tends towards a sort of expressionism-at-the-third-remove. M. H. MIDDLETON.
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