ART
ANNA MAYERSON'S conceptual improvisations at the Hanover Gallery owe more than a little to Paul Klee—in their mobility, their orches- tration of colour, their linear arabesques and conceits. At times I fancied I caught echoes of Sutherland in a little explosion of yellow or a black tangle. And then again it seemed as though those children at play were suspending the natural laws as effortlessly as Chagall's lovers. Miss Mayerson obeys no rules. Her titles—Birth of the Dragon, Between the Moon and the Rose—are to be taken as glosses rather than descriptions. Peter Barker-Mill shows cheery and rather repetitive pastels of Cap Breton, Brighton and Biscay at the same gallery.
* * The London Gallery has opened two more rooms. Within, the way of orthodox surrealism is pursued with all the devotion proper to a Nonconformist sect at its temple. Among the exhibitors this month are two Australian artists. One, James Gleeson, plays all the tricks with all the fetiches, and packs in good disintegration-value for money. Many passages of his oils are delicately handled—a posy of flowers, a drapery—but his decorative ability seems to me to emerge more happily in some of his drawings. Robert Klippel shows a number of three-dimensional pleasantries (could they have been made out of knitting-needles ?) which suggest models of crystalloid or molecular structures, or perhaps solid versions of some of Picasso's blotting-paper doodles. These are gay and by no means unpleasant. There are first one-man shows by Cawthra Mulock and John Pemberton, and upstairs may be seen drawings and paintings by Lucian Freud, grouped around one of his most impressive and most terrifying portraits. These are first-rate examples of one of the most individual talents working in Great Britain.
* * * *
At the Leicester Galleries are paintings by Paul Maitland, a friend of Sickert, who died in 1909. I must admit that before I saw these I knew neither Maitland's name- nor his work. Now, however, I know why Sickert said of him that he was a born painter. All these pictures are small, sometimes tiny, but how characteristic of their age and their subject are those of Kensington Gardens and the river at Chelsea, and how, exquisite the half-dozen best! Also to be seen here are some bright, rather theatrical and nursery-like, compositions
Previous page
