ART
Cohen, Bratby THE two London galleries most consistently and courageously backing the young un- knowns of their choice lie at opposite poles. Gimpel Fils provides a home for abstraction; the Beaux Arts has been most remarkable for its new `realists.' It is debatable whether the powerful spotlight which. is nowadays focused upon the very young does more good than harm—the welcome crusts in the kitchen have to be judged against the forcing-house atmosphere in the studio. And yet the inability to push a painting through to a conclusion has always been an English weakness; perhaps it is no bad thing after all to strive early for completeness of expression.
At all events, here at Gimpel's is Harold Cohen, an accomplished painter who ap- pears at first to be exploring an abstract space made fairly familiar to us by artists in France and America. Out of this abstract mesh of light tones, however, there appears at a second glance a series of wraith- like figures, recalling those photographs of ectoplasmic presences at a seance. Cohen has talent, but it is too soon to see where it is leading him. At the Beaux Arts is John Bratby, who is most easily described as an English expressionist. Can the neurotic passions of northern Europe really take root on these mild shores where the cricket- ing virtues prevail? (To English eyes it was a great irony that Hitler should have branded that art as un-German.) Bratby does his vehement damndest to extract the last ounce of desperate passion from the spectre-eyed ladies and the higgle-piggle of objects crowded on the kitchen table that are his subject matter. On goes the paint, trowel-thick, in great linear strips that follow the form like livid weals. The florid `power' achieved by this means perhaps provides the easiest way of bludgeoning the spectator into awed submission, but the result too often suggests rather a desperate desire for intensity than a desperate in- tensity. I do not believe Mr. Bratby is as brutal as he would have us believe, and in whipping up the surface emotion he too often loses the unifying vision. But this is not the whole story. Bratby's debt to Ger- man expressionism is no greater than that owed by hundreds of his contemporaries to French cubism and which goes unnoticed
every day. And there are canvases at the Beaux Arts which do convince: one is a self- portrait, anotlAr the still-life No. 1. Bratby could turn out to be a considerable painter as his grasp of the unities grows.
M. H. MIDDLETON
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