ART
RICHARD EURIC.H, in his new exhibition at the Redfern Gallery, seems a little ill at ease. Having forged a technique of skilful and delicate assurance, he appears not altogether certain what to do with it. One senses a somewhat forced search for " subjects." With a flick and a scumble he can put the foam on a heaving sea, but the application of such faultless and effortless technical competence to a contrived version of Jonah and the whale seems unworthy of the accomplish- ment. Neither fact nor fancy here has the authentic ring—neither the stodgy King's College Chapel, Cambridge, nor the Walpurgisnacht of the scarecrows. The loving precision of the Hertzogin Cecilie has been superseded by near-sentimentality and a somewhat flaccid rusticity. The painter is not, one feels, engage. Eurich is a reporter, not a novelist. But the grand occasion is necessary to fill the sails of his imagination, the impossible problem necessary to extend his powers full-stretch. To both of these, as we know, he can rise superbly.
Also to be seen here are some excellent small toiles brodies by Frances Richards, and some slight and charming sketches from France contributed by Walter Goetz. Goetz makes great composi- tional play with pairs of retreating streets disappearing round some foreground block or island. By the use of thin opaque colour (in which emerald green is often a constituent member) brushed lightly over an almost white ground, he obtains a milky quality that is rather sweetly attractive.
* * * The other current, shows include Josef Herman's dark, sooty drawings from the Welsh mining valleys, as a foil to Martin Bloch's strong colours, at the Ben Uri Gallery ; a small collection of interest- ing things—Tintoretto to Seurat—at the Marlborough Fine Art Gallery, and Homage to Frances Hodgkins at the St. George's Gallery. The latter is not, of course, on the scale of the retrospective exhibition held at the Lefevre Gallery a year or two ago, but it is a carefully chosen cross section of nearly thirty years of Frances Hodgkins, and includes works which will be new to many. Such, for example, is the group of three Edwardian from 1918. It is tempting to look back from the safety of sure knowledge and try to find hints in the earlier work of the later pyrotechnics. Before 1929-3o her vision seems to me entirely undistinguished. It is tempting to speculate upon the causes which focused sufficient warmth on her talent to set the whole thing off. I have no idea of the answer. What seems to me completely certain is that Frances Hodgkins was a great woman, and by far the greatest woman painter
we have ever had in this country. M. H. MIDDLETON.
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