ART
SIXTY-THREE Picasso drawings—about one- third of the cycle which marked his great burst of activity the winter before last—may be seen at the Marlborough Gallery. They show a wonderful, impish, sad, vigorous, wise old man musing about love. Some, in coloured chalks, are severely simple; others are as full-toned as the plates for Button. Most are drawn with a brush. Scratch and blob, scribble and splash, the, sequence falls on to paper at the rate of three a day for nine weeks, an extraordinarily moving procession of archetypes and personal symbols that look back over the artist's whole life. They show the painter and his model : he, young and preoccupied with exactitude, old and shortsighted and still pi'eoccupied with exactitude; she, cairn and inviolable, certain of her youth and her femininity; she plays with a cat, with a monkey; the artist, ever more farouche, himself grows simian, becomes a clown in a circus, a masked satyr. They are like figures seen from many angles in some hall of mirrors of the imagination. A savage, casual, comic strip that somehow asserts the values of art while appearing to destroy them. The draw- ings are shown under a new reflectionless glass; this is lightly etched on one side to pre- sent a mat surface, but very slightly diffuses the image it covers.
Picasso in Bond Street and Mrs. Edward Hulton's Klees at the Tate would make a normal week. In actual fact the 'season' has produced a particularly rich crop of exhibi- tions. French painting is to the fore—from the Barbizon artists at the Hazlitt Gallery (and how welcome the chance to study Rousseau and Diaz and Dauhigny and Dupre'), through a charming selection (Bonnard, Vuillard, Braque, etc.) at the Hanover, which bears all the marks of an admirable personal taste, to Vcnard at the Lefevre Gallery and Soulages at Gimpel Fils. Soulages (there remains only a day in which to see the exhibition) is the most powerful of the free abstractionists in Paris. His canvases are large, austere, passionate; thickets of angry black and brown depicted in huge brush-strokes; records of the act of becoming.
Then there is Gilman at the Tate; Ehrlich at the O'Hana Gallery; Mark Tohey at the Insti- tute of Contemporary Arts. Let me especially recommend, however, a visit to 4 St. James's Square, where for a few more days there is a remarkable exhibition by the Swedish artist C. F. Hill (1849-1911). From Arles, in 1888, Van Gogh wrote to Theo of 'the new painters alone, poor, treated like madmen, and because of this treatment actually becoming so.' Expres- sionism, as a movement, was largely a psychotic art; like Van Gogh himself. both Hill and his compatriot (and almost exact con- temporary) Ernst Josephson became disordered in their minds while studying in France, suf- fered imaginary persecutions, and came to be- lieve themselves in communication with the spirit world. Both subsequently produced an endless stream of unshackled fantasies which have affected the course of art, not merely in immediacy of something freshly seen. And whereas few of Josephson's earlier works are of particular interest to us today, Hill's (de- rived from Corot and Courbct) shows him to have been an honourable minor realist and poet of the impressionist period. His stone quarries are painted with genuine integrity, his trees in blossom with passionate lyricism, a moorland night scene with elegiac grace. A
northern Samuel Palmer. M. H. MIDDLE:TON
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