ART.
THE NEW ENGLISH ART CLUB.
AFTER a generation of impressionism, which has largely meant a preoccupation with the external side of nature, a heighten- ing of tone and brightening of colour, a generation has sprung up that is questioning the whole representation side of art and is eagerly hunting back amid the conventions of ancient art, from Siena to China, to recapture an inner message that they think has escaped in the advance and settling down of modern painting with its elaborate machinery upon the whole province of vision. The form which this reaction has taken in France has drawn the town to the Post-Impressionist show at the Grafton Gallery. The characteristic thing about the New English Art Club's exhibition at the Royal British Artists' rooms in Suffolk Street, is that our young men who see visions express them in the simpler terms of sight, sans cubes, sans force-lines, sans the perspective of volume. This may be the effect of the selection committee, but one fancies that it is more likely to be the characteristic English attitude even of our revolution- aries not to break violently with tradition. Besides the search for the inner significance of their subject, they are intent on the architectonic qualities in their design and on a first-band decorative appeaL For these things they will offer up much that was held dearest by the pioneers of the Club. Even a superficial glance round these walls will arouse a rare curiosity and pleasure. To the finer qualities of impressionism, which reach a flower-like loveliness in Mr. Wilson Steer's water- colour, A Calm, Evening (No. 65), and his Turneresque oil, The White Yacht (No. 150), and are present in Mr. F. Brown's On the Thames (No. 152)—perhaps the best work he has given us—in Mr. F. Dodd's water-colours of Blackheath Village (No. 120) and Soho Square (No. 66), Mr. David Muirhead's A Landscape in Dorset (No. 131) and Mr. D. S. MacColl's very charming Scarborough (No. 103), is added a large series of pictures, mainly by new men who follow other and fiercer ideals, and in the place of honour, dominating the whole show, is Mr. Augustus John enthroned in his vast painting, The Mumpers (No. 149), a work as uncompromising as its name, a dejeaner Bur l'herbe that would have been more startling than Manet's had it come earlier in Mr. John's career. As it is, we can still breathe quickly before it and say, in the language of the subject, "0 lor' !"
The scene is a worn field in spring where a band of gypsies in two groups await a meal of fish which is being cooked. There are signs of hurry in the whole composition. The face of the old man with the pipe seems to have been drawn in from an etching of Mr. John's Rembrandt period that be found lying about, and the hands have not been made to suit it ; the figure on the grass is boneless; the roll of smoke from the fire takes away the base of the chief group and rather destroys the monumental effect to which he has given so much care in the massing of forms and the silhouette. The lonely and hateful baby on the grass yells, as well it may, at the impossible task given to it to link the two groups together. But Mr. John's faults always seem to have come from want of time rather than from want of will or of hand. Apart from the tremendous pressure of the draughtsmanship and the oneness of its inventions, which show how completely this artist pos- sesses his own imaginative world, there is his unfailing, almost dainty, decorative instinct, by which he captivates so many people who hate his subject-matter and his ideals. His choice of a clay field with isolated patches of grass was never surely made by Mr. John the gypsy, but by Mr. John the decorative artist. No wonder his whole band here have a protesting and questioning look. Mr. Orpen, more reasonably, has his charming model inside her gypsy tent looking very pleased (No. 151).
Mr. John has dominated my notice as he dominates the show. I am only able to mention Mr. W. Rothenstein's large panel to symbolize the religion of the East (No.130), dignified and interesting as is all he does, but on a second visit it seems as though the self-effacement of his theme had been followed too far in the representation. Among the newer contributions Mr. Darsie Japp's Saddleback from Wallthwaile (No. 167), Miss Elsie McNaught's Beddgelert (No. 124), Mr. Innes's whole series, and Mr. Harold Squire's The Green Lane (No. 180) in landscape, and the pictures of Mr. Ilhee and Miss E. Darwin and Mr. Nerinson in figure, are all very interesting works of much potentiality. Mr. C. J. Holmes, Mr. C. hL Gere, and Miss Tyrwhitt contribute pictures up to their own
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