ART
GIMPEL Fus are showing sculpture by Robert Adams and drawings by Ern Brooks, both strangers to London. Mr. Brooks's pen draw- ings are some of them clever and all of them slight. So far as they go they are attractive enough, but it remains to be seen whether their sophistication is more than a decorative mask to hide fundamental deficiencies. Mr. Adams's wood-carvings, some abstract, some based on the human figure, are of the Moore-Hepworth school, though without the virtuosity and subtlety of those artists' creations. The abstracts in their preoccupation with a single theme seem to lack, not only invention, but a certain inner movement and richness. In the figures there is sometimes a suggestion of clumsiness. But if these works miss the final inevitability, they nevertheless suggest minor contributions to this particular language (for instance, in the way lesser forms like limbs are related to greater forms like covering shawls). I think they show considerable promise.
* * * The Leicester Galleries offer four widely differing exhibitions. Anthony Devas contributes characteristic paintings of an academically accomplished, and where necessary suitably flattering, kind. Anthony Cross is represented by a collection of documents in his quick, fine-spun shorthand from France and Fulham. On surveying four walls of them, my first reaction was that he can do this sort of thing standing on his head with one hand strapped behind his back, and that the tremendous concentration required of this light-
weight calligraphy, if it is to avoid an empty monotony, was lacking. Though their colour is disappointing, I think my first reaction was wrong. Gross's work is of a minor but very delightful order.
Denis Mathews contributes a room of colour-monotypes—a tech- nique that seems especially suited to the linear talents of the younger British painters. A certain authority attaches to a printed surface that distinguishes it from pigment applied by hand, and it is possible to achieve textures and effects not otherwise to be procured. Mr. Mathews's pictures contain some subtle and gentle tone and colour juxtapositions, reinforced by crisper accents of dark. Some of them are completely successful ; some lack coherence. My general im- pression was that the technique sometimes got the upper hand.
Perhaps the most pleasant and charming of these exhibitions is that of Lucien Pissarro's work for the Eragny Press. Lucien came to England in 1883, and under the influence of Morris and Ricketts set up in 1894 the press which he kept going for some twenty years. Camille Pissarro disapproved of his mentors and the archaic founda- tions of their work. Said the old man: "It's not a question of pretty Italian elegance, but of using your eyes a bit. Decidedly, we no longer understand one another." But of course they did. You have only to look at the little portrait of Camille (No. 82) to see that. And, in fact, Lucien's work was less archaic in feeling than that of Morris. He was a child of his time. There are echoes of Keene— even Kate Greenaway—in his wood-engravings, and his Impressionist upbringing shows itself in his use of colour. His decorations, illus- trations and end-papers are charming and gay and fresh—as Philip James has it, "a little gleam of pageantry."
M. H. MIDDLETON.
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