ART
FUSEL1 to me has always suggested the bogus clairvoyant who one day, without quite knowing how, managed to "get through." The posturing little Swiss—" capricious, vain and affected" Northcote called him—tried hard to inspire pity and terror, yet he succeeded, for most of his life, in achieving only a series of contrived alarums, grimacings and gesticulations, puffed up to a size where they appear drained of all real content. His Gothic ambitions patently outran the executive abilities he sought to learn from Michelangelo and mannerist etchings. He was a child of his turbulent period, a poetaster, "a refugee from culture" as Mr. Nicholas Powell has it ; one who turned to painting partly to pique his father and partly because it paid better than writing. And then, for a period, in his drawings of women, this self-styled "painter to the Devil" really did achieve documents of terrible significance, really did reveal an almost demonic power. The overt horrors are replaced by an atmosphere heavy with implications of perversion. The enigmatic backs slide into the massive necks that taper into the monstrous head-dresses. Nothing happens, yet the tension is the tension of nightmare. By drastic changes in scale, by the juxtaposition of nudity and the most elaborate clothing, Fuseli's own psychological quirks and his preoccupation with certain sexual fetishes have produced a fevered intensity that still affects us a century and a half later.
I see no reason, as a result of the exhibition which the Arts Council and the Pro Helvetia Foundation have brought to the New Burling- ton Galleries, to reverse the current assessment which associates Fuseli's importance first and last with his drawings. To be sure, some of the cleaned canvasses from Switzerland show passages here and there of colour and handling which may surprise those who only know the leathery oils in this country. Equally, the inven- tive powers they show, which seem so ludicrously inadequate to us today, must be judged against an age in which the dream had yet to be exploited as a source of the unexpected. Nevertheless, Fuseli Was not a painter. It seems unlikely that his present fashion will continue to grow or that history will grant him as high a place as that claimed by Professor Ganz—though at the same time he will never now disappear from view as he did before 1914. The exhibi- tion includes a small number of drawings by some of the artists associated with knell—Romney, the Runcimans and the ever-
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