Art
Two Visionaries
By NEVILE WALLIS
BEAUTIFULLY assembled by the Waddington Galleries, the re- trospective exhibition of Jack Butler Yeats, the poet's
brother, may well be a revela- tion to students who never saw the National Gallery's honour in 1942, or the Tate's six years after. The imaginative, haphazard quality of the artist's books, echoing his musical speech, may be almost forgotten. But his painting, especially the liberated, ex- pressionist work of his later years, closing in 1957, when melancholy underlay the soaring spirits in his Celtic flights of imagination, has steadily gained recognition more in these islands than abroad. Critics still fight shy of declaring that here is someone of much more account than an exuberant Irish singer. This collection, indeed, is further proof that Yeats became a visionary of heroic stature who, as often as Kokoschka, transcends his time and country.
Twenty years ago It might have seemed to visitors that Yeats's painting was becoming recklessly impetuous and his imagery at times incoherent. Today we are accustomed to the freest improvisation. The instinctive nature of Yeats's humanist impulse, however, is seen to have surer controls. Behind the most extravagant statements of windy heath and sea and their tatterdemalion heroes there is evidence of a keen observation of character and also the discipline of drawing. His youthful pen drawings, pre- viously shown here, for all that they are usually little more than racy illustrations, already indi- cate this feeling for character and the drama he would heighten with steep-angled views.
This collection begins with Yeats's earliest, rather tight little paintings of chance encounters in Irish street or circus tent, done around 1906, and possessing some psychological interest with his visual alertness. A chancy luminosity and his own streaky, glinting handwriting begin to appear in the 1920s with his impressions of Dubliners travelling by tram, bus or ferry. In the tilt of a peaked cap and a saturnine jaw may be conveyed all the romantic self-dramati- sation that is summed up in Shaw's Captain Brassbound. This group of pictures holds promise of the later radiance. But it hardly hints at the visionary who came to realise his theatrical, literary and countryside memories as epic matters. The regional scene of Brassbound shifts to the universal arena of Brand. Yeats's art now ceased to reflect present things and began to reflect things long past. The style of wristy, necked jewellery of colour and loose construc- tion can keep pace marvellously with the imagination. Perhaps there is nothing at Wad- dington's quite so ravishing as a vision I remem- ber of 1947, Queen Maeve walked upon this Strand. But frequently one is held by the flickering unity of a design, its gem-like notes scattered apparently with abandon, yet orches- trated with the consciousness of a Watteau.
It is easy, but misleading, to compare Yeats's liberation with Turner's. The greater master was always the professional, his mind stored with a vast repertory of images ready to hand. The lesser, more emotional and chancy artist had, however, I believe, a deeper personal experience before nature. Turner may overwhelm. But never could he give one the heart-tug in a painting of a wild boy on a gorsy heath, which yields its scent and sounds. Yeats's every painting comes freshly, as every breeze on a heath comes anew.
Edward Burra's art is a peculiarly baleful one which puts one in mind of that sinister bloom, the orchis militaris. So it has been since he first came forward as one of the Surrealist handful which became a force in British art in the middle 1930s. Burra's latest exhibition of his big sub- stantial water-colours at the Lefevre Gallery reminds one again that the marshland streaked with tributaries around Rye seems naturally suited to the bodeful aura which this reclusive artist imparts. The disturbingly expectant air of an allotment with a man digging, saturated with emotive colour, shows his eye and imagination working together with such obsessional inten- sity as Spencer brought to Cookham.
Burra's more enigmatic pictures here are mainly conceptual and composed of classical and bizarre elements. Grey forms of antique sculp- ture with Atlas-like caryatids are used as a stylised foil to set off the vivid colours and in- cidents with which they are decoratively woven. In this symbolic vein is a design of writhing statuary supporting the masonry of a tomb, rather as if some agonised Fuseli were translated in the decorative terms of a Braque of 1922. Only Burra could have conceived and organised such fantastic imagery on this scale in stiffened water-colour. But his peculiar gift is more per- suasive when he looks down at some fair dis- persing along a silent coast, and his visual. eX- perience becomes transmuted into a primitive revelation of a dream-landscape.
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