Sow–artists—Van Gogh for example, or Blake—start with nothing and have
to fight all the way. Others seem to start with everything. With what prodigious gifts is Sir Frank Brangwyn endowed ; how easily he strides the problems of composition, of draughtsmanship and technique ! From his hand have come etchings, woodcuts and lithographs ; posters, tapestries, ceramics, metalwork, stained glass ; paintings, watercolours and vast mural decorations. With reckless prodigality he has poured his energies into a profusion of activities throughout his long life, and has now, in his 86th year, been accorded the honour of a retrospective exhibition at Burlington House by the Royal Academy—the first by a living artist ever to be held there.
A whole generation probably needs to be reminded that thirty years ago Brangwyn, almost alone among artists in this country, commanded a world-wide reputation. After the First World War a Brangwyn museum was projected in Tokyo ; others were founded in Bruges—the city of his birth—and Orange ; he executed great mural schemes in Missouri and New York ; in 1924 no fewer than 10,000 people visited his last big exhibition in London. As a young man he took artistic counsel from Bastien Lepage and Meunier ; worked for three years in William Morris's workshops. He is related remotely by influence to certain art nouveau tendencies (to early Vuillard, say, and to Munch), to Pryde, Gordon Craig and Lovat Fraser. But it must have been the exotic splendour of foreign lands that really set his imagination aflame and produced the heroic vision and opulence of his mature manner. He has voyaged from Tunis to the Danube, Russia to South Africa, America to Japan. Against this panorama he has seen mankind as swept along in a great pageant of history. He has depicted the upheavals of war and earthquake, the maritime splendours of Empire and the pomp and circumstance of industrial civilisation. For Brangwyn, born a year after Kandinsky, two years before Matisse, belongs really to the period of Elgar. With Elgar he shares a virtuosity of technique, a richness of colour and tonal orchestration, and something of the same confident, expansive vigour.
But do the vigour and the vision sound a little hollow when tapped ? Visiting the Diploma Gallery is like revisiting the romantic Idealism of one's youth. What a titan, one felt then, straddling the puny world of daubers and dabblers ! But now, to a disenchanted age with the stench of the ovens in its nostrils and the threat of nuclear extinction ahead, Brangwyn must on occasions seem over-declamatory, curiously unidentified with his subject, unreceptive to subtleties of observation. He can assemble generalisations with the ease of a Rubens, with the unflaggingly muscular panache of a Mestrovic, but they are apt to remain generalisations about something he has seen and now knows, rather than now sees afresh. (Note, for example, the stan- dardised knuckles of standardised hands.) There are some 470 works on view at Burlington House, with the emphasis on drawings and graphic work (some of the etchings are no bigger than postage stamps). All the original cartoons for the abortive House of Lords decorations are included, and some splendid watercolours. The animals, the bridges, the sumptuous still-lifes, the toiling humanity—all are here. Though he is capable of gentle and lyrical evocations of landscape, it is Brangwyn's magnificent patterning on a large scale that stays in the mind. More often than not he marshals his crowds of extras, and orders his scenic effects, in two-dimensional layers parallel to the picture plane, but a painting like Marche sur la Plage (463) shows that he can manipulate perspective and organise in depth with mastery.
M. H. MIDDLETON.
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