CONTEMPORARY ARTS
Picasso and Others THERE is new evidence of Picasso's astonish- ing legerdemain at the Lefevre Gallery. The last exhibition of his work there was impres- sive enough, gathering together as it did a number of undoubted masterpieces. This time there are fewer masterpieces--maybe none—and the presence of a hying old master is less strongly felt, but, since all the ork is fairly recent, it provides a welcome portunity to study genius that is no less stless for the passing years. Though one nscs a disinterest in pursuing any idea yond the notation necessary to establish is reality in the artist's mind, Picasso's energy is unflagging, his perception as quick as ever. The sculpture, new to London, holds the greatest interest. Described in ords it has the true Beachcomber ring, rown together as it has been from old rks, stone jars, bits of wrought iron and so n—evidence of what has been called the old njuror's 'desire for Promethean creation, pr the invention ex iiihilo of active signs' H. Kahnweiler). Thus the head of a onkey holding its babe started life as a 'ld's toy motor-car—a faot from which e sculpture neither gains nor loses in the ast analysis but which seems to us odd mainly because of the verbalisation of our concepts. Picasso has reached the naivete of great visual experience where analogies operate in purely visual terms, and informa- tion received through the eye is an end in itself. This forcing of the spectator to use is eyes upon visual form rather than con- ptual 'meaning,' this animation of diverse d inanimate objects, is linked to the aims of, say, Graham Sutherland when he paints the portrait of a chrysalis or root. But here Sutherland's result is usually ominous d filled with an expressionist disquiet, icasso's essays have a jaunty air, a rum- pstious playfulness, which precludes the lcmnity of philosophising about them ny more than a perfectly executed series of andsprings or somersaults or cartwheels. * * At the Tate the Arts Council has availed itself of the temporary closing of the Jeu de ume to borrow from the Louvre a number "impressionist pictures centred upon Manet. Several of the most famous of Manet's paintings are in too delicate. a state to be moved, but those from the National Gallery and the Home House Trustees have been included, so that this is still the most important display of his work ever to be seen in London. It is good to meet again Lola de Valence and La Dame aux Even tails, and to see the thirty Homo House etchings. But for me the greatest pleasures of the pictures, but rather suggest an integrity out- weighing that of an artist like Tissot. In these works by Bazille and Monet, one can see too the starting point of the early Vuillard.
M. H. MIDDLETON
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