ART
THE annual exhibition of Artists of Fame and of Promise which remains open at the Leicester Galleries until August zoth is an inexacting collection well suited to a hot summer's day. The pieces of angry geometry, without which no mixed show is nowadays complete, have this time been driven into corners, where they can almost be heard muttering beneath their pigment something about "artists of shame and of compromise." For the merit, or as some may think the fault, of most of the pictures is that they are pleasant and refreshing to look at—though it may be admitted that many of these landscapes, intcriors and still-lifes look weak and commonplace beside such a masterpiece of impressionism as Claude Monet's Le Pont-Neuf, which hangs in a place of honour and is under- standably "not for sale." The younger painters have also to compete against good examples of the work of Steer, Nicholson and Sickert, and against a finely conceived early Orpcn that should be at once an encouragement to their better instincts and a warning of what may happen to a painter when he is seized in the grip of his own popularity. There is some interesting painting by Ruskin Spear, Duncan Grant, Raymond Coxon and Derek Hill ; Karin Jonzen's terra-cottas deserve not to be taken for granted ; while an effective decoration by Ivon Hitchcns and John Minton's ugly but clever The Aquarium may perhaps be considered the farthest obser- vation posts to which one need advance in hot weather. The drawings by Sicken, Gwen John and Wyndham Lewis in the entrance gallery should not be missed; nor should Betty Swanwick's fantasy of Louis Wain cats at a seance—it deserves a place at the humorous art exhibition in John Adam Street. D. H.
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