ART
Alphonse Quizet ; William Gear ; Robert Adams. A CERTAIN romance attaches to the exhibition of paintings by Alphonse Quizet at the Redfern Gallery, for this sixty-eight-year-old peintre des faubourgs, though known in France, is quite a new dis- covery in London. As a boy, moreover, he helped to initiate the young Utrillo (in fact two years his senior) into the mysterious craft of painting. By his suggestion, it is said, Utrillo learnt to gather every day the palette-scrapings of his mother, Suzanne Valadon, for use—in place of the tubes he could not afford—upon such Mont- martre townscapes as had already fascinated Quizet. Later they were to share the '! Villa Medicis "—a shed which belonged to Max Jacob, and which he permitted them to use as a painting place. It is hard to avoid comparisons with Utrillo in writing about this show. Here are the same views up alleys and divergent roads to the village on top of the hill, the vistas over the rooftops of the city disappearing into a romantic haze of grey, the tall tenements and the low cottages, the Lapin Agile and the Moulin de la Galette, the off- white, snow and the chalky-white Sacre Coeur. But these are more vigorous, less elegiac, paintings than Utrillo's. There are hints of Van Gogh and even early Cezanne, of a calmer Soutine, of Vlaminck, of Lepine and Loiseau and Pissarro ; in other words Quizet fits perfectly into the pattern of a developing tradition that was essen- tially French. The paint is lively, the colour fresh ; the directness of vision provides its own counter-balance to the loss of poetry that Utrillo has achieved at his best.
Messrs. Gear and Adams share the floor and wall space at Gimpel's. Adams is the most calm and classical of the younger abstract sculp- tors who have emerged since the war. He has steadily refined his forms towards the cube, the cone and the cylinder, and is less inter- ested in the problems of " open " sculpture than most of his con- temporaries. In his most typical pieces—in wood—the elemental forms are assembled vertically around a single upright, the surfaces being enlivened by various surgical incisions, by the removal of cylindrical plugs or by being studded with stumps that stem from the trunk like the limbs of a lopped tree. The resulting columns have a cold and rather uninventive sort of finality. Adams is also experimenting with smaller artefacts in polished bronze, like pleasantly useless ashtrays or paper-weights, with a simplicity of surface recall- ing Brancusi. His black-and-white collages show great assurance within their limited field.
Every exhibition by William Gear shows the little kaleidoscope patches of flat colour whirled into slightly new combinations, and this is no exception. There is a cheery vigour about the patterns that is bracing. Gear is bound by the second dimension however, and, limiting though it is, he oversteps the boundary at his peril. The large painting here of footballers is broken up arbitrarily on the surface, and fails to convince as a composition in depth or in the flat.
The other exhibitions include paintings by William Johnstone, at the Lefevre Gallery ; a first London show by Csato, resident in Paris, at the Hanover Gallery ; another at the Ben Uri Gallery by Emmanuel Levy, resident in Manchester. There are prints by Lautrec to be ,een at the O'Hana Gallery, at 13 Carlos Place, and some pleasant things by French and English artists at the Adams Gallery in their new premises at 24 Davies Street.
William Johnstone is the dynamic principal of the L.C.C. Central School of Arts and Crafts. A rigorously controlled dynamism, of cubist origins, permeates his sombre, brooding landscapes. The breadth and simplicity of his handling has affinities with that of other Scottish painters, but his most recent works, in which the content is refined down to one or two patches of colour and a few nervous calligraphic flicks of the brush, are very personal. CsatO, using an equally low-tones palette, produces a more succulent dish. Set in his quiet, flat greys and browns, the pink of a fish or the yellow of a lemon signs with a clear musical note. Most charming, perhaps, are his very small still-lifes, which seem to contain within themselves all that is to be found in the larger paintings. M. H. MIDDLETON.
Previous page
