A Maturing Painter .

AGAIN, and so soon it seems, John Bratby is holding a large one-man show and as always his work at least forces the spectator to make

0 0 a positive response and assessment. On the credit side is the valuable 11' boldness and vigour of his attack, his essentially

4:' generous appraisal of things, a refusal to limit :it; tfiaiss te)bjectives in the cause of modernity or good

. And there is the excellence of his draughts-

it' Man 1, S"IP when he has pencil or chalk in hand;

group of drawings on the front stairway of

I'' the Beaux Arts Gallery should not be missed. But

so to look there at a back view of a naked child and ilY then to discover its development within a large

iS com!ing of a day nursery points to one short-

ing of Bratby as painter. Brush and pigment -as translating id) into aating his black and white method directly

be stance fat coloured lines take the nerve and sub- gl, drawing . from the forms. The immediacy of the ive chilmdicing discovers the particular vitality of the

L s body; in the other place only the vortex

ise cif brush strokes survives. Again, his colour re- 01 inai is confined and inflexible; if there are many

'Lit different colours in his paintings, their total effect

as has in unvarying quality of what I can only define i; , )urriess. And the characteristic way in which ',1 legs or arms, paintbrushes or trumpets thrust out Into the pictorial world over the rims of the can-

from rom the natural world is becoming a conceit.

I' ainh dis habit spoils one of four pictures (Nos. 1, 2, 3 reason in the catalogue) which offer a special V 4.eas )11 for visiting this show; they indicate a very

Posi

i

„lc artist's and encouraging progression in the [1,' a c [ s career. Each of them is a long rectangle,

inemaScope shape, and each presents a new ,,,' complexity of space and perspective; the eye is

Ico led firmly down several avenues within the one

perhaps, in these experiments a hint of forced Psre, through firmly established vistas. There is,

i

c Cont .vance, but the viewpoint is not a picturesque 0

per

, one. have The deliberation and thought which seem to di 11 Nett had gone into the making of these pictures has _eahaPpy results. The tension of the design has

screwed tighter and the painting of individual parts is more concentrated and eloquent. The treatment of a glasshouse in one of them is par- ticularly fine. In the past I have always found a conflict between Bratby the 'neo-realist' en- grossed by the presence of people and things, and Bratby the 'action painter' enjoying the plasticity of paint and the pleasures of manipulating it. He has been subject to the same temptations as Matthew Smith, who at times has flourished glibly with the brush and treated paint and colour like a carpet-bedding gardener. At a time when the managers of the youth cult insist that youth must have its fling, it may be discouraging to suggest that Bratby seems to be moving—without loss of energy—towards artistic middle-age.

BASIL TAYLOR