ART
MANY exhibitions in London clamour for attention, from the London Gallery's Early Chirico (to which an entrance charge of one shilling seems rather exorbitant, notwithstanding the presence of the ever- wonderful Melanconia) to a small, but admirable, mixed show like that mounted by the A.I.A. in their minute gallery in Lisle Street. Certainly one of the most fascinating is that of old sculpture and modern drawings, presented by Messrs. Roland Browse and Del- banco. This is the reverse side of the coin they showed us in 1946. Not only are the two component elements transposed, but whereas the impetus behind their old drawings and modern sculpture derived largely from Mediterranean classicism, an essentially northern and Gothic emphasis this time binds the sculpture to the linear roman- ticism of much of the drawing. (Leslie Hurry, for example, flanks a sixteenth-century St. John.) There is a positive gain on both sides. Sickert, Gaudier-Brzeska, Tchelitchew, Moore and David Houghton contribute some of the other drawings in this carefully arranged and instructive show • the thirteenth- to sixteenth-century carvings are French, English, German and Flemish.
Sickert was the most professional of painters—he could turn almost anything into a picture—and a measure of the same craftsmanship informs the more modest, but always honest and dignified, work of his disciple, Lord Methuen, who is holding perhaps his best exhibi- tion to dale at the Leicester Galleries. Now and again Lord Methuen's handling of paint seems fuddled and woolly (for example in Nos. it and 33), but for the most part his pictures, especially the architectural ones, are firm and assured, while his drawings are delightful. Margaret Thomas, in her first exhibition, supplies neither the weight nor the organisation necessary for her more ambitious essays, but many of her smaller still-lifes of studio brit-A-brat are entirely successful. Charm pervades the best ; and a feminine sweet- ness of colour, perhaps derived from Bonnard and Vuillard, enlivens their gentle surfaces. * * * *
The curious but compelling combination of Bauchant, Lurcat and Klee has been thought up by the Lefevre Gallery. The genuine sensibility underlying Farmer Bauchant's precise naiveties is perhaps most validly seen, not in the full-scale " historical " compositions, but in works like the little flower-piece just inside the door (No. 2), which has a genuinely painterly quality. Lurcat, the accomplished neo-academic, midway between the primitive and the pure research- worker, plays cunningly with his dislocated horizons and semi- surrealist perspectives. Many will feel conscious here of a certain coldness and emptiness which the rich texture of his tapestries disguises. It is noticeable that, while Bauchant and Lurcat have been hung together, Klee, the research worker, is shown alone. And
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