ART
ROLAND, Browse and Delbanco's very pleasant new exhibition has been called Aspects of British Romanticism—with the charitable object, it may be, of helping the critic to pull out from the pickling-jar a favourite truism, or yet another smooth generality, about romantic painting. I refuse to be drawn, and content myself with saying that most of the artists one might expect to find in a show of this size are there—James Ward ; Haydon, with his unfinished Meeting of the Unions from Birmingham ; John Martin, together with a real De Mille version of Sodom and Gomorrah inspired, if not painted, by him ; one of the Stubbs Lion and Horse series (compare the quivering tensions with the Hallowe'en pleasantry of Fuseli's pantomime donkey !) ; a grey-green Loutherbourg Shipwreck, with which may be bracketed the exact tonalities of Joseph Wright of Derby's Light- house ; Hitchens, Piper, Sutherland and Yeats representing the living. But Henryk Gotlib's bottle-green and brick-splashed cow has nothing, surely, to do with British romanticism, however delicious it may be ?
Hitchens may be seen in close-up, so to speak, at the Leicester Galleries. Of so idiosyncratic a manner, it is inevitable that one's first impression is of repetition. Any single one of his long canvases (why do so few painters feel the need to escape the proportions of the cinema screen ?) would look better by itself or in a mixed exhibition. Together they suggest a limitation and slightness rather unworthy of their true content. For decoration is not their only function, delightful though the surface always is, with its semi- transparent colour, the flash of the brushwork and the sparkle of the virgin canvas. The eye wanders, returns, broods upon a patch of colour. Suddenly an illimitable vista opens before one, magical as a childhood dawn. One smells the freshness of the morning and the damp leaf-mould underfoot.
Hitchens might echo the Matisse who said : " To paint an autumn landscape I will not try to remember what colottrs suit the season, I will only be inspired by the sensation that the,,season gives me ; the icy clearness of the sour blue sky will express it just as well as the tonality of the leaves. . . . The autumn may be soft and warm like a protracted summer, or ... give a chilly impression and announce winter." But Hitchens has taken Matisse's freedom of colour and has divorced it from Matisse's linear rhythms. Instead he constructs plastic abstractions in depth. One explores them, and miraculously finds oneself exploring the pools and paths and clearings of a Hitchens wood. Though his work is personal, it is never private, with the ingrowing toenails of literature and psychopathology. It is characterised rather by a thoughtful lyricism, a lightness without frivolity.
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Six respectable painters—Baynes, Bell, Ginner, Grant, Moynihan and Winifred Nicholson—may be seen at Agnew's -; Augustus John surveys himself with a penetrating and anything but respectable glare in a mixed show at Tooth's ; Mr. Slatter is showing a " must " exhibition of Dutch and Flemish masterpieces.
M. H. MIDDLETON.
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