Art
Plagiarism and Vulgarity
THE paintings which Mr. Mark Gertler is at present showing at the Leicester Galleries display many of the failings of modern English painting. Starting with a fundamental lack of originality, Mr. Gertler tries to create a stir by more or less adroitly serving up a certain number of ideas which have been current for many years in Paris and by indulging in one or two mild "stunts." It is not unusual to find in an exhibition of modern English painting reminiscences of the more popular French painters and it is perhaps fair to say that in Mr. Gertler's work they are less blatant than is often the case. Nevertheless I cannot believe that the resemblance with Matisse and Derain in some of the nudes and with Chirico and Gauguin in certain still-lifes are purely accidental. One thing, however, distinguishes Mr. Gertler's method of borrow- ing from that of most of his contemporaries. In general, borrowings in painting merely turn out duller than • the originals, but Mr. Gertler manages to make his definitely more unpleasant. This seems to be due to one quality in his work which is generally rare in English painting at the present day, namely, vulgarity. On the whole our painting lacks inven- tiveness and perhaps life, but it is usually restrained by a certain taste, in itself a pleasant quality, though it may be to sonic extent inseparable from the lack of vitality from which contemporary English painting seems to be suffering. Appar- ently in a desire to attain richness, Mr. Gertler indulges in the cheapest devices and methods of colouring. The method, almost reminiscent of poster art and perhaps a survival of his training in stained glass, of outlining the objects in his still-lifes in heavy, dark lines is one which very rapidly wears thin and the effect of vulgarity is intensified by the monotonous insistence on a high colour scheme of hot reds and over-rich browns. The painting entitled After Greco, though neither a good copy nor an interesting interpretation, gains a certain distinction lacking in the other pictures in the exhibition from its connexion, however remote, with the great Spanish master.
Mr. Jack B. Yeats, who is exhibiting paintings of Ireland and Irish life at Messrs. Leger's Galleries, seems to be ultimately the outcome of Impressionism. I do not mean to imply by this that he is derivative, but simply that he appears not to have paid much attention to more recent developments in painting and to have found an idiom suited to what he wished to say in a modification of the Impressionist technique. He does not, on the other hand, seem to have arrived at this idiom immediately and the earlier paintings show him using a tight style of drawing and unharmonious colours, as, for instance, in the Drumchffe Races. Of the more mature paintings those containing figures and mainly representing racing or circus scenes show a very Impressionist disrespect for human beings, fragments of whom are allowed to appear at the edge of the canvas, the rest being out of the picture. This method is effective and gives the effect of a casually caught impression rather than a carefully thought out com- position. In some of the imaginary landscapes such as the Summer Day, Near. a City, Long Ago, the deliberate neglect
of orderly composition has perhaps gone too far, and everything seems to have teem sacrificed to obtaining a rich impish) of flamboyant colours, so that the paintings tend to become succulent but incoherent. The most successful paintings in the exhibition are those landscapes from life in which the artist has been restrained by a certain fidelity to nature.
Mr. Wyndham Lewis' drawings at the Lefevre Galleries, under the title " Thirty Personalities " would be interesting even if one had never seen or heard of any of the characters represented. That is to say, they are very good drawings in which the artist has given proof of great feeling for line and skill in the reduction of complex forms to a simple convention. But, as the title of the exhibition indicates, the primary object of the drawings is to catch a likeness, not merely of a physical appearance but of a character. From his more experimental periods Mr. Wyndham Lewis has acquired a wide knowledge of different kinds of technique, so that he can always lay his hand instantly on the idiom suited to his subject. In the portrait of Mr. Desmond Harmsworth he has fixed his subject with economy of means and apparent facility ; in that of Wing-Commander Orlebar, perhaps the loveliest piece of drawing in the exhibition, he has used a more elaborate and apparently more self-conscious method ; and over Mr. Chesterton he is frankly funny—but the joke is
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