ART
RECENT paintings by Ivon Hitchens are now on view at the Leicester Galleries. For Hitchens the material starting point is the most slender of excuses, soon to be left behind for a subjective world of tone and colour that is to all intents and purposes abstract—a flashing world of heavenly music. This digression from the initial view of the object is not always to his advantage, however. Existing merely as paint, and without the authority lent by reference to the tangible world, his pictures not only become intolerable guessing games but lack that internal coherence that would give them com- pleteness and finality. Stiffened with the sinews of visual facts, they are exciting, romantic magic. The wide skies and far horizons of Lord Methuen's Sickertian Landscapes at the same galleries are characterised, as ever, by integrity and cultured charm.
Also to be seen here are etchings and engravings by members of Atelier i7—a school of engraving founded some twenty years ago in Paris by an Englishman, S. W. Hayter, with the object of exploring the technical possibilities of the medium. Since 1940 the school has been working in New York, and the majority of the exhibitors in the present collection are therefore American, though such names as Chagall and Masson are included. Much of the work is art- school stuff, as reminiscent of the 'twenties as a cloche hat or a square of " futuristic " linoleum. Technically, however, the ex- hibition is of the most lively interest, and the door is opened on to new worlds of texture and treatment. Every combination of printing techniques is attempted with considerable virtuosity, but in particular the group shows some of the infinite possibilities of the soft-ground etching. A leavening of such adventures would have• enlivened the collection of prints and drawings made by the British Council from a sum presented by Lord Wakefield, and currently on exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The selection is catholic in a lop-sided way, but timid. Since the very raison d'être of the collection is that it shall be toured overseas, within and with- out the Empire, the gaps in representation—Sutherland, Moore, Burra, Wyndham Lewis are four of the first names which come to
Previous page
