ART
Old Surrealism and New Realism As the thunder of the great revolution rumbles away into history and many of its aims are seen to have been cfnmerical, a number of inevitable reactions are seen to be at work. One is a retreat from abstraction to some form of realism; one is the dissolving of that durable image which so many cubists, surrealists and expressionists laboured to construct, and which they hoped would remain final statements for all time. (It is of interest that the sculptors have concurrently dissolved their traditional mass into space.) Half-a-dozen of the new exhibitions show which way the wind is blowing.
Take Magritte at the Lefevre Gallery. This is his first show in London for fifteen years and the seventeen paintings mark well —with the one exception of his odd impres- sionistic period during the war—the progress of a loyal and single-minded surrealist. Some of these follies have power to shock us still—for example the bowler-hatted, wax- work bank-clerks of L'Assassin Menace remain as sinister as Jean Vigo's dwarfish headmaster in Zero de Conduite—but how is one to take seriously the gentleman whose nose turns down into the bowl of the pipe he is smoking? This unequivocal trornpe- Neil surrealism belongs 'now to history (and to advertising). Compare the evasive, shifting, intangible horrors, of Francis Bacon at the Beaux Arts Gallery, where the image dissolves—quite literally—into thin air behind a glass barrier of reflections. Here in these screaming heads, like so many Orpens from some Bedlam of the mind, is an ambiguous state of flux, of becoming, a deliberate refusal on the part of the artist to commit himself to any final statement. If you can take Bacon at all (forgetting about "good painting"), these are good ones.
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Also at the Beaux Arts—now becoming such a lively and worthwhile gallery—is the first show by Derrick Greaves, a youngster who has recently won a scholarship to Rome. He marks-the renewed interest in realism, and takes his place easily and with assurance among that group of his own generation which has already gained recognition. More than they, perhaps, he contrives in such. paintings as his black and shining Sunday in Sheffield and his still-life ofetwo chairs in an empty room, to transmute the visual impres- sion into a new autonomous reality. He may well be compared in this with Raymond Guerrier from Paris, to be seen at the Redfern, with whom he shares the fashion- ably low key that is to be found equally in the work of Buffet and Minaux across the Channel and the Royal College of Art realists over here. Compare his views of Venice, where the water, pitted with rain, has turned to a heaving concrete plane that points the spatial drama of that astounding city, with Guerrier's Quai de Paris seen from
a window. Guerrier is supported by centuries of French taste and intelligence, and a wholly admirable if restrained colour sense, but save in sheer experience the Englishman is not inferior.
M. H. MIDDLETON
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