ART
Paintings and Lithographs
GOODNESS knows what the picture-buying public is to do. People are told to save, and they are also told that there are thousands of artists out of work ; that art must bc kept alive in war-time, and that to keep art alive you must spend money buying pictures. Several London galleries have come to the rescue and are showing pictures that for one reason or another are cheap and good. The Leicester Galleries show excellent miniature paintings, all 81 by 6 inches, and all at five guineas. The effect is that of an album of rich postcards. Ordering artists about on matters like size and purpose is productive: the trouble begins when discipline is applied to the kind ; and there have been no strictures about that. So here are all sorts, looking well together in regular rows, when if they were all shapes and sizes they would nudge and mumble. And the proprietors, when asked how business is in war-time, can say : " Oh, fair. We've sold sixty or seventy pictures this week."
The Lefevre Gallery shows some good water-colours, and at Zwemmer's there is a sensible mixture of drawings, paint- ings, block-prints and lithographs. At both these exhibitions an ordinary man might ask the price of many of the exhibits without receiving a severe set-back, and he could buy a picture without paying more than he would for a golf-bag, or as much as he would for a Bren gun.
At Wildenstein's is a volume of contemporary English paintings prefaced (in the outer salon) by modern French pic- tures. There are works of charm by Vivian Pitchforth (two estuary pieces with boats on the beach and a wind on the water) and Ethel Walker, and works with more than charm by Graham Bell, Moynihan, Pasmore and Rogers. Graham Bell's resounding blues and greens in The Banks of the Seine are like early stained glass with the soft pedal on. The room is dominated by a fine Graham Sutherland landscape, looking a little out of place because his museum masters have been Blake and Braque rather than Manet and Degas. But the thought of Courbet makes a tie between them.
The Redfern Gallery and Colnaghi's show lithographs. In lithography you can do two things. You can create an original picture and print a number of copies of it yourself, or you can reproduce a drawing or painting and print an almost unlimited number of copies of it that look more or less like the original. It is a medium wider in its range even than oil painting, and this is its virtue and its pitfall. It can be used by the artist working in his studio, and by the big commercial firm working with fast machines that often print more than one colour at a time. But the results are not the same. The nearest you can get to telescoping the two is to go to a commercial printer who understands what the artist is driving at, and there are one or two of these. But con- sider : at one end of the scale is the poster that covers a vast hoarding, at the other—the modest productions of the Sene- felder Club at Colnaghi's. A lithographer is like a man play- ing a piano whose keyboard stretches out of sight in both directions. He can't use all the notes. He can get a machine with fifty hands to play it—and photo-lithography is the super- pianola of the modern art world—but he will produce better results if he plays a few modest movements on the notes he can reach from his piano-stool. The best artists in these two exhibitions have limited themselves severely. The members of the Senefelder Club use what is, to me, a rather dull and overworked range, with exceptions. Vincent Lines and Mona Moore, among these, play the necessary tricks with the medium, but their drawings are unmannered, so they produce results that are special to lithography and special to themselves.
The Redfern Gallery shows some masterpieces in the medium, and in other colour-print mediums too. Toulouse-Lautrec's lithographs have a lasting quality because the grain of the stone on the paper, the rich way the paper takes the colour— the swift sensitive surfaces of colour on plain paper, belong to lithography and to lithography only. The family m a dog- cart (Le Tonneau), travelling at an angle across the pale buff sheet, is flat in its frame, and yet, like a fine Japanese print, as you look at it it almost prances across the wall and out of the door into real life. Yet it is as strictly conventionalised as a still-life by Braque. The Bonnards and Rouaults here run it
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