Art
The Stage and the Frame
ARE there many artists liciw for who'lm the theatre has the fascination it had for Degas, for Watteau, for Sickert in his j-outh ? It seems not r but it is easy to find, on the contrary, painters of brilliant promise who are attracted to stage .and costume design. Mr. 'John GoWer Parks, for instance, despit3 the work he has shown at the New English Art Club and elsewhere, despite the fact that he is *a member of the staff of a faMous art school, is certainly winning himself a reputa- tion far more quickly by the charni and originality of his ettings for The Coiintry Wife at the Ambassadors than he could ever hope to do by painting. Mr: Duncan Grant, too, Whose exhibition at the LefeVre Gallery is proving one of the most successful of the year, has enormously increased his public by his ventures in the theatre ; and Miss Cathleen Mann, who is exhibiting such accomplished and modish portraits at Knoedler's, has a room in addition devoted to costume designs.
Mr. Ardizzone, who is having a show at Leger's in Bond Street, besides being a draughtsman whose touch appeals to connoisseurs, is already a comedian. The sculptor has a harder task. Personally, I always feel he is not nearly enough employed either in the theatre, in commerce, or in advertising. I am not suggesting that Sir Alfred Gilbert should have been commissioned to deal with the sky-signs in Piccadilly in addition to his other airy achieve- /trent in the middle of it ; but the phrase 'airy achievement' reminds me of a man worthy of both honours ; I mean Maurice Lambert, brother of Constant 'Lambert the musician, surely the most versatile, the most employable, the best technician, of all modern sculptors. " Airy achievement " is exactly the phrase for his flight of larks in the Lefevre Gallery's narrow upper room. No style, no material, no undertaking in any medium seems to come amiss to him from his astonishingly life-like portrait in bronze of Mr,, Adrian Stokes, vibrating with challenge and drama, to the exquisite finish and design of his group of fish. Sheer physical strength no doubt has something to do with an achievement like his carving and polishing of a gigantic lump of green onyx, one of the most sumptuous objects now to be seen in London.
. But is there necessarily a connexion between the stage and the frame, between art and drama ? Or is there a kind of painting and sculpture which gives one, so to speak, a rest from human preoccupations, from space as we sec it on the stage, from time as we feel it in a quickened heart-beat ?
When we come back from the theatre or a party or from the clash of humanity in daily life, is there a kind of art which we can contemplate with feelings quite other than those we have used all day ? The artists who think there is do not form so small a minority really as is often supposed ; for al landscape, I think, is primarily art of this sort. But it is the kind of art, unluckily-since it claims to be pure art, un- mixed with the excitements of drama and devoid of obvious emotional emphasis or association-which is the subject of such heated discussion that many people imagine it to be the special province of highbrows and aesthetic theorists. But this is really the reverse of the truth. It is true that painting has now become a specialized subject, divorced from all familiar themes of poetry, allegory, mythology or religion, and that it is now getting more and more impossible for the ordinary man to discuss it in the same language that he uses for talking about books or ideas. But on the other hand, it is now more possible for the ordinary man, and also the ordinary woman, to appreciate a good painting at the first glance, in the same way that he or she appreciates a pretty rcom or good clothes.
More and more the modern painter tends to make pictures easy to look at. That a picture at first sight may give a shock of pleasure no more emotional or poetic than that which we feel at the sight of an attractive shop-window may seem to have reduced the artist to the level of the advertisement- expert, or the scene-painter. But it has at least also had the effect of raising the advertisement-expert and the scene- painter nearer the plane of the artist. W. W. WECKWORTIL
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