ART
FOR Picasso's 70th birthday the Institute of Contemporary Arts has arranged a retrospective exhibition of his drawings, from a careful study of a plaster cast, done at the age of twelve, to a couple of lightning scribbles done only two months ago. The choice has been made—by Roland Penrose—with a nice sense of balance. Exercises in invention alternate with exercises in seeing ; doodles and witticisms with drawings where the full, magisterial weight of the master has been brought to bear. Throughout the multitudinous progressions, the fixed points of the tonic scale that is his own personality can now be seen. In particular, Cubism has permeated and enriched his most romantic conceptions, as it has that of so many other fundamentally romantic artists. Study, for example, the thighs and legs of the 1907 Female Nude before going to Keith Vaughan's new exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery. Vaughan has gradually jettisoned many of his more win- ning characteristics in favour of the- austerities of 1907-10. There is one painting in Bruton Street that is completely Cubist in its reshuffling of planes and forms, while there are several in which the more or less transparent projection of planes across the picture surface plays an important part. Nevertheless Vaughan has retreated from the frontiers of austerity, and many, I imagine, will find pleasure in his return to a „slightly less private vocabulary. Half-a-dozen paintings here mark an authentic advance.
M. H. MIDDLETON.
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