At the Marlborough Gallery is a fine double exhibition of
paintings by Pissarro and Sisley, many of them from France and Switzerland. Behind the unassuming grace of impression- ists like these—second only to Monet and Alanet—there is the weight of centuries of Furbpean culture. Yet they have something in common with their unknown and untutored aniemporaries in the New World and it is he fresh, sharp pleasure of the innocent and ;Illectionate eye. 'Every picture,' wrote Sisley, 'shows a spot with which the artist himself has Fallen in love.' In this, particularly, lies the harm of his own elegiac fragments.
Sutherland's new portrait, this time of Arthur Jeffress (at whose gallery it is shown), makes the most satisfactory picture since the \Ilaugham. Constructed onec .again about a firm central upright, it shows. the subject sit- ting across a chair, legs tucked underneath, rms on the curling back; in the background a trip of damask or wallpaper. The flesh is the ()lour of brass, the background red, the clothes a blue-grey. The legs dwindle again Ito a Baconian fog, but at least they are there, 11 nplied in their entirety, and the painting is the better for that. Every artist knows that Painting is really a series of tricks by which his vision may be translated into paint—he finds 'a way of doing it.' Whether Sutherland's Portraits are better paintings than his landscape is a moot point, but he has certainly found his way' of doing them now and this seems to me his most confident to date. likewise show a marked increase in confidence. The tentative character of much of his earlier abstract work now becomes fully apparent. The new reliefs are crisp and clean and filled with light. Their composure is that of recon- ciled tensions, rather than of an absence of tension; their austerity is relieved by the gentleness of their colour, which contrives to charm but never sully the purity of their con- ception. With this exhibition (which closes tomorrow) Pasmore really makes a contribu- tion to European non-figurative art.
M. H. MIDDLETON
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