Art
A New Experiment
THE Embassy Theatre, Swiss Cottage, has started an experi- ment which I sincerely hope will be continued there with as much success as it deserves. It is an idea which might be adopted with advantage by other places of entertainment. The first night of Mr. Neil Grant's entertaining political play The Nelson Touch also witnessed the private, or perhaps to be accurate I should say public, view of some recent paintings by Mr. Edward Wolfe. And this is only an earnest of what is to come, for I understand that it will be the policy of the manage- ment to exhibit with each successive play, whenever possible, either a one-man show or else a small " omnibus " collection of works by various young modern painters. No doubt there are difficulties in arranging such matters, but the management of the theatre and Mr. Wolfe's agents, The London Artists' Association, seems to have overcome them.
The paintings, one or two of which I remember were in Mr. Wolfe's last exhibition in the early part of this year, have been hung in the Foyer, the Stalls Bar, and the Circle Bar. The result was that a charming and intimate air of informality was achieved. People wandered about during the intervals, chatted with friends about the play, discussed the merits of the pictures and on occasion found close examination of a particular canvas an excellent excuse for failing to catch the eye of a boring acquaintance ! What an admirable extension of theatrical amenities !
The thirty-three canvases are mostly flower pieces or North
African subjects, but they include two rather striking portraits, one of Mr. Cunninghame Graham, the other of Mr. Ede, the author of Savage Messiah. I recommend The Yellow Kaftan, Mintima, Spanish Girl and Zinnias more particularly. Mr. Wolfe has a beautiful sense and knowledge of colour, and I have yet to see a picture by him which would be as successful were it transposed into another scale of colour—and that is more than can be said of a great deal of contemporary painting !
To return once again, however, to the example of the Embassy Theatre, I feel that this sort of thing, properly organ- ized, might be carried out very well in the provinces. Inte- resting small exhibitions—collections of from twenty to forty paintings—could with a little trouble and arrangement be transferred from London galleries to theatres and cinemas outside the London area for short period loans. There would naturally be the problems of transit and insurance to be settled, but these costs should be more than offset by the value of publicity gained both by the picture gallery and by the provincial theatre or cinema and by the prospect of increased sales through a wider public becoming familiarized with the work of individual artists. There is one more point, too, which might be mentioned here. Already there is a tendency in some of the more magnificent cinema theatres in London for those concerned with the embellishment of the interior to plaster the lounges and so on with quantities of oil- paintings which would make an honest mock-auctioneer feel uncomfortably self-conscious. Would it be a terrible gamble if original work by young modern artists were to be substi- tuted for these " genuine oil-paintings done by hand " ? But perhaps this is too much to hope for in an imperfect world !
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