Art
Bargains THE modest collector of paintings will find a series of dangerous temptations confronting him if he visits Messrs. Agnew's exhibition of water-colour and pencil drawings. The present writer, at any rate, was astonished to find what ten guineas could buy, though his pleasure (which was in any case only theoretical) was rather spoilt by finding that most of the real plums had already been snapped up. However, it is improper to write of this exhibition as if it was a white sale, for it contains many works of art which, if not great in the strictest sense, are certainly very good.
Chronologically, the series begins with a small group of eighteenth-century Venetian drawings, an exquisitely observed Cengletto, Old Walton Bridge, from the Fauchier-Magnan collection, and half a dozen Tiepolo sketches in red chalk, including two studies of hands, one rather coarse drawing after sculpture, and one of a head curiously doubtful in sex, but with the line quivering as only Tiepolo can make it. Eighteenth-century England scores well with a magnificent group of water-colours by Francis Towne, an artist always revealing wholly unexpected beauties. From this particular group the quality which comes out most clearly is his avoidance of the picturesque. In the Isola Bella he has chosen a scene which would have warmed the heart of Gilpin, but has treated it in a way which would have frozen it again. The island appears against a wall of towering mountains and is lit up by two direct rays of sunshine which break through the clouds. But by smoothing the mountains and reducing the rays to geometrical pencils he has deliberately shirked the offer of picturesqueness, and produced an effect to us far more moving by calculated understatement. Or, again, what could be more romantic as a subject than the colossal rock in the Bowder Slone or the menacing ruin in Wenlock Nunnery ? But, tied in by the wiry, stilted line of Towne they take on a beauty more closely allied to the mathematical beauties of cubist painting. The water-colourists of the nineteenth century are well represented : a series of important and, to judge by the sales, popular de Wints and a fine group of Turners. Of the French the artist most strikingly represented is Constantin Guys, who in the drawings here exhibited shows every aspect of French life in his (lay. The most important depicts French troops kneeling before the Pope's carriage, and, apart from having a historical interest for its subject, this drawing has the advantage of being not a sketch but a complete and carefully calculated composition. Various degrees of smart- ness, respectability and gaiety are represented by line Eliganle, Promenade and Scene de Bouge. Two drawings by Cezanne, a figure study and a drawing of Paget's Hercule Gaulois show how much more at ease the artist was in front of a statue than in front of the nude, and how much more sensitively he consequently drew the former. For those who do not fly as high as this there are fifty water-colours by con- temporary artists, including a lovely Wilson Steer, which, somewhat unexpectedly, turns out to be by Robin Darwin.
A little further up Bond Street, the Redfern Gallery is holding an important exhibition of paintings by Christopher Wood, covering almost the whole range of his production. The exhibition provides the first opportunity for forming a really general judgement of this incredibly gifted painter, whose qualities are singularly difficult to analyse. One, however, stands out very clearly, namely, an intense serious- ness. Even when he was merely experimenting in the idiom of some other artist the result is important and not a mere pastiche, and in the great series of Brittany paintings, pro- duced during the last months of his life, it is this seriousness that raises them above the experiments of the French Super- realists in the same direction.
The Leicester Galleries have a roomful of recent paintings by Frans Masereel. Those who already admire his woodcuts will perhaps be disappointed to find there only four of them, hidden away in a passage, but it is at any rate interesting to see what he does in paint. The result is unexpected— romantic views of sand-dunes and sea in which however the grimness of the country and the heaviness of the fishermen who stand, wind-swept, in it are superbly rendered. Some, at least, of the sketches of Moscow are exciting and the big painting of Lenin's tomb is realistically, curiously effective.
ANTHONY BLUNT.
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