ART
THIS year the Government quietly raised the ban on the import of works of art for sale. Three West End galleries have so far been conspicuous in grasping the opportunities offered by the end of the trade barrier. They are the St. George's Gallery, which has repeatedly done it best to help us establish foreign contacts since the end of the war ; Gimpel Freres, who have sometimes collaborated with *the Anglo-French Art Centre ; and the Hanover Gallery, which, in a few months, has established for itself an enviable reputation for worth and adventure. In its own field, the London Gallery also battles steadily against provincialism.
At the moment the St. George's Gallery is showing paintings by the young Turkish artist Nejad, who is a son of Fahrunnissa Zeid. Like a good many of his countrymen, he has been bewitched by Paris. He is still feeling his way between an oriental splendour of patterning and the metaphysical abstractions of spatial architecture which are currently popular across the Channel.
Gimpel's are showing a really splendid collection of French prints. Notice the Picasso full-face head ; the three Braque lithographs, especially the lovely, if unexpected, tea pot ; the embroidered simplicity of Hecht's burin line and the controlled hardness of Hayter's ; the light, lucid Scgonzaes ; Suzanne Humbert's accomplished restatement of Bonnard ; Derain, Miro, Maillol and the abstracts by the younger generation. Coming so soon after the exhibition at South Kensington and the Redfern's " Painter-Printers," this show will probably make a good few people wonder why the English print—lithography apart—is today all but non-existent.
The Hanover Gallery has imported a show of Dufy. Dufy. at his best is no more than chic decoration, but he is chic decoration at its best. Upstairs, Isobel Lambert distils something of the silent terrors a museum can inspire. Her barbed and skeletal birds and fishes float in a surreal limbo of the imagination, a hinterland that owes something perhaps to Giacometti. These spectres animate a back- ground of almost flat colour and rectangular scaffolding. There is observation in their articulation by nervous flicks of the brush, three-dimensional space in the tones. Whether the curious and uneasy result is capable of further development remains to be seen. M. H. MIDDLETON.
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