ART
IT has more than once been suggested that the gallery-going public in this country are so slothful or so timid that until an exhibition has been made respectable by mention in the weeklies and the Sundays it does not occur to them to attend it. If so, three allitera- tive casualties of the compositors' strike must have been the return to the V. and A. of the Raphael cartoons, now incomparably better displayed than in pre-war days ; the rumbustious comic strip formed by 150 Rowlandsons from Mr. Gilbert Davis's collection ; and the assembly of Rubens drawings and paintings at Wildenstein's. The first alone remain with us
" Romantic " and " scientific " impressionism dominate the new exhibitions. Gimpel Fils are showing a baker's dozen of Monet's, starting with a smoky grey winter landscape of 1873 and ending with one of the diaphanous water-lily exercises, dated 1907—a transition from the particular to the general, from observation to concept. For a period between the late 'seventies and mid-'eighties Monet achieved a tension between the structure of the thing seen and the symbol of light-atmosphere he abstracted from it. At either extreme his statements became commonplace and flabby. Even in the middle of this period, as with the painting here of his garden at Vetheuil, he was sometimes quite incapable of giving any unity to the multitude of sensations that importuned his eye and accepted, as Sir Kenneth Clark has put it, " total immersion in a bath of appearances."
The year this picture was painted-1880—Signac wrote to Monet for advice. Three years later Seurat completed La Baignade. By 1886—a year of antagonisms and " passion," as Van Gogh wrote, " worthy of a nobler and better aim "—the impressionist movement was dead. In the last group exhibition of that year George Moore had to go down on his hands andknees in order to distinguish the various hands of the " little green chemists who pile up tiny dots" (the phrase was Gauguin's). The visitor to the Redfern Gallery's Pointillists and their Period may well, on the other hand, be struck by the richness and variety of the works gathered there. He should have no difficulty in distinguishing the lyricism of Signac from the bold lushness of Luce, the naive stiffness of the Pissarros from the uneven but often pleasant Guillaumin. It is not an exhaustive collec- tion ; there is but one oil by Seurat and two by Camille Pissa rro. the American T. B. Meteyard. and the total effect is illuminating. Most of the canvases are as near to Monet as they are to Seurat, for their authors, blinded by the method, overlooked Seurat's recall to order in painting. Space permits only a glancing reference to Ivon Hitchens's nudes at the Leicester Galleries. The almost abstract treatment of space- is-depth and invention of colour harmonies which characterised his flower-pieces and romantic landscapes are here modified by inescap- able problems of form. There is a gain in compositional strength, but only in some of the pictures does Mr. Hitchens as yet exhibit the complete assurance and inevitability of his best landscapes. At the same galleries Claude Venard's succulent blacks and greens arise naturally from the mental climate of a Paris with a painting century of taste and culture behind it, and Kenneth Rowntree is as dextrous,
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