Art
English Novelty THE London group selection committee was evidently intent this year on avoiding at all costs the charge of being old- faihioned or out of date. The exhibition at the 'New Bur- lington Galleries, therefore, includes the correct quota of all the more advanced forms of painting. In Mr. Piper we have the last stage of orthodox cubism ; in Mr. Moynihan a logical conclusion to abstraction (more final, perhaps, even than the white square on a white background) in which the subject is in every sense eliminated and nothing is left but the medium itself. In this way Mr. Moynihan's canvases are perhaps only parallel to the film which Mr. Humphrey Jennings once proposed to make by simply scratching a continuous line along a piece of celluloid and then running it through the projector. For myself, I have yet to be convinced that the importance of such works goes beyond the field of technical experiment. Superrealism (now that Mr. Herbert Read has taken to the spelling Surrealism, I believe I am alone in my pedantry) is, of course, represented, and Mr. Blair Hughes- Stanton seems to find the humour of the subconscious more congenial than the wit of the conscious, which used to be one of the great qualities of his earlier style. Among the more restrained exhibitors many seem to be suffering from an over- indulgence in that dangerous quality of sensibility, valuable when combined with a vitaminous diet, but by itself pro- ducing only anaemia. Mr. Ivon Hitchens, for instance, seems to me about to cross the border-line between an interesting pallor and visible ill-health. At the opposite extreme stands Mr. Adrian Allinson, whose commanding attitude in the face of Nature inspires confidence. To make landscape coherent without making it conform to a pre-arranged pattern is one of the vital steps in- the development of realism, and, in this matter certain painters can perhaps learn much from Mr. Allinson. Mr. Coldstream is one of the few artists at the London Group in whom sensitiveness does not seem to lead to a sapping of vitality or realism, and his portrait of Miss Anrep is one of the most hopeful works in the cxhibi- The lower gallery at Messrs. Tooth's is filled with recent works by Mr. Matthew Smith, while a. selection of his earlier canvases hung upstairs provides an instructive contrast. For Mr. Smith's style has unquestionably changed in the last few years. Perhaps the most conspicuous difference between the new and the old lies in the colour. _There was a moment when Mr. Smith's colour threatened to become so stylised that his paintings looked as though they were executed in an elementary three-colour process. This is not to say that they have not always had very great qualities, but they certainly tended towards monotony and towards a wholly emotional use of colour. To judge from the new canvases Mr. Smith is moving towards variety and realism. His palette has grown lighter and its range has widened, so that instead of reducing anything to his particular colours he now follows the colour- indications supplied by the theme. He no longer paints garden-paths crimson, as he did in the early Cornish Landscape, but is willing to accept new colours such as the cold whites in Tulips (27). These changes all show a tendency towards realism, and it can now be said that Mr. Smith secs and paints realistically what interests him. His realism will only become complete when his interest is extended beyond flowers and apples to subjects of deeper human importance, but the portraits in the present exhibition, particularly Sisters (17), seem to indicate that this widening of interest is already beginning to take place.
The Wertheim Gallery is showing the work of a young artist, Mr. E. H. G. Belton, who is by training a musician and has only taken to painting within the last year. His paintings have the advantages which one would expect in such a case— very great freshness of vision and a purely personal but arresting sense of colour. What is more remarkable is tile, in some canvases at least, Mr. Belton already shows great skill in the manipulation of paint, with which he makes the richest impasti. Whether or not he will become a really serious painter seems to depend on his ability to keep the freshness of the landscapes and, at the same time, develop the more solid qualities apparent in a work like Portrait of a Boy.
ANTHONY BLUNT.
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