DRAWINGS AND PAINTINGS
Drawings for Pictures. (Arts Council Gallery.) ROGER FRY'S child thought and then drew a line round his think. "Let this be plain to all," said Michelangelo ; "drawing consti- tutes the fountainhead and substance of painting and sculpture and architecture." Palaeolithic man decorated caves with images that are, whatever the means employed, essentially drawings. Drawing lies at the very root and origin of art and the artist's thought processes. The exhibition in St. James's Square, which collects the drawings that relate to paintings by fifteen contemporary British artists, is of extraordinary interest as showing something of -the diversity of those processes. All drawing, to some degree, is an act of memory— the record of an image in the mind. Nevertheless there are those made before the motif, where the duration of the memory-act is brief—where eye, mind and hand are keyed to such a pitch that the image seems almost to have transferred itself to paper ; there are those made " out of the head" in which the intellectual digestive process has long been at work. Some concern themselves only with the elucidation of form (as in Renaissance Italy) ; some imitate the expressive effects of light and shade (as did Rembrandt). There are working drawings, in which the compositional framework of a projected painting is evolved and elaborated ; and there are prelimin- ary studies which, having served their immediate purpose of clarifying the artist's mind, are dispensed with or destroyed.
All these, in combination and permutation, are represented in this exhibition, and may be compared with photographs of the finished paintings. Not many are of any permanent value, but the light they shed on the methods of individual artists is considerable. Of two equally" realistic " painters, Ruskin Spear, it seems, always paints from drawings ; William Coldstream never. Lucian Freud, whose linear precision suggests graphic origins, does not make drawings for paintings ; Keith Vaughan, on the other hand, works out all the major problems of a painting in terms of pencil on a very small scale. Ceri Richards uses his drawings for limbering up ; Sutherland makes a progressive series of studies, from the culminating point of which is shaped the final statement in oils. Something of the same sort happens in Pasmore's series of a Cornish beach, in which the clouds, waves and boulders gradually become more and more self-sufficient until they exist only as interlocking jigsaw shapes. More surprising to many will be the elaborate mathematical and geometrical scheme upon which the same artist's apparently impressionistic Hanging Gardens of Hammersmith was based. It is- the clearest glimpse in the exhibition of poet and mathematician
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