ART
Paintings by Robert Coiquhoun, Robert MacBryde and Gouaches and Drawings by John Minton. At the Lefevre Galleries--- Etchings and Wood Engravings by David Jones. Watercolours by Edward Lear and Edward Burra's designs for " The Miracle in the Gorbals." At the Redfern Gallery.
THESE three young men are painters of talent and fine craftsmen. Whilst still adhering to a common framework of style, and greatly influenced by one another, both MacBryde and Minton are begin- ning to diverge from the formula best suited to Coiquhoun. This formula, based on the heritage of cubism and negro sculpture, exploited by such diverse figures as Braque, Wyndham Lewis, Picasso and Modigliani between 1916 and 1926, is a good one, if a trifle inhuman. Colquhoun's new paintings both adhere to and advance from it. His pictures are powerful and unpalatable, and they compel admiration. He i preoccupied with the female figure, but he ignores all forms of pleasurable association, his use of savage colour dissonance has great emotional impact. ?These harsh two- dimensional paintings will administer a beneficial jolt to the ardent Francophiles in search of the delectable.
MacBryde, still affected by the formula, and in particular Braque's use of it, paints with all the charm Colquhoun has dis- carded. His pictures, mainly still-lifes, possess lovely qualities of colour and surface. Their weakness lies in a certain derivative formal monotony, but most of the new paintings have a technical virtuosity, a delicacy and a succulence which would make the possession of one a pleasure without strain. Of the three, John Minton is the weakest and perhaps the most sensitive. The formula does not seem compatible with his essentially lyric talent and is in no way a development from his earlier and very beautiful paint- ings of London streets. But he has modified the stern pattern making, implicit in the manners, with aspects of Sutherland's lucid and flowing shorthand ; and being an exquisite landscape draughts- man has produced some beautiful work. His figure drawing remains very weak.
A small room of engravings, mostly illustrations to The Ancient Mariner, possess the refinement and subtility always associated with the work of David Jones, but seems to lack the sinister force de- manded by the poem. Lear, whose comic genius so long -over- shadowed his mastery of watercolour drawing, has of recent years come into his own, not only as a serious artist, but as an infl- ence on contemporary watercolourists. Edward Bawden, the late Eric Ravilious owe much to hint, and he has even been acclaimed by the Surreatists for the wrong reasons. These drawings combine poetry with topography in an exquisite fashion.
Burra, like Colquhoun, is a salutary jolt. Indeed, Burra is one of the major jolts in English painting today, and his impact is im- portant because, unlike the expressionist ravings of so many hopeful satirists and untutored hysterics, his work is strongly controlled. His costume drawings for this ballet of the Glasgow slums, ruthless and caustic, re as English as Rowlandson, and they show him more clearly in the tradition than do his more exotic subjects, while the scene designs, particularly those for the act drop, combine his macabre power with a sombre poetry. The work was well exe- cuted and is very successful on the stage. It is indeed a relief to find both in Burrs and Colquhoun so palpable a demonstration of the fact that limp impressionism does not constitute the direct British line, famous in time past for being thin, red and tough.
MICHAEL AYRTON.
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