ART
IT is always rash to speak of national characteristics in art, especially in Europe where the strands are inextricably woven. One thinks of the " elegance " of the French, or the " passion " of the Spanish, but conscious nationalism can normally sustain only the group activity of minor figures. • Nevertheless it is useful to have a point of departure. The exhibition at the Redfern Gallery of some sixty Dutch' painters from the last half-century is the first of its kind in England, and, faced by the unfamiliar, visitors may require some talismanic generalisation. Dutch art, in the patt, has shown a placid realism; an intimacy, an earthiness and a sober, puritan dis- taste for sensual charm. These two qualities have extended into the modern movement, only, it seems, to disappear in the most recent work of all On the one hand romantic artists in Holland, from Van Ostade to Van Gogh, have been animated by an unflattering response to character and to the daily life about them. This preoccupation with genre and character inevitably diverted one branch of modern Dutch painting towards expressionism, rather than Cubism. In the Bergen school, Kruyder, Toorop, Sluijters and the Wiegman brothers, a specifically Lowlands style (it is related to that of the Flemish Permeke) found its best-known exponents. It is heavy, sombre in colour and ponderously monumental. On the other hand the classicism of Vermeer found its latter-day outlet in the movement De Stijl, which set out to purify painting, sculpture, architecture, typography and furniture-design to the utmost point of puritanism. None can have pursued an end with greatei fixity orpurpose than Nondraan, though the two paintings here only, hint at his epic struggle with absolutes—and with impossibilities.
There is an echo of the seventeenth-century painters in the
exact rendering of detail by Dick Ket and the gentle near-surrealism of Willink. In the canvases of the youngest generation, however, there is little that is distinguishable from the inventions and confec- tions of post-war Paris, though it is interesting to note that con- temporary Italy seems to be exerting an influence on some Dutch painters as well as Dutch_ sculptors. Work by Charles Eyck, William Oepts, Dick Elffers, Van Kruiningen and N. Wijnberg may be noted. In view of the strong graphic tradition in Holland, it is perhaps symptomatic that the latter's lithograph of Bathers seems more assured than his painting of the same subject, and indeed a number of the lithographs shown suggest individual personalities.
M. H. MIDDLETON.
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