ART
A TRIPLE bill at the Leicester Galleries. Dora Gordine's supple and orientalised figures are well known. Though she attends with some care to matters of texture and colour, she is really concerned with line, with firm curves, movement and human arabesques.
William Roberts in his drawings is faithful to the mechanistic idiom of thirty years ago. Let not his lapses into mannerism blind you to the delicacy of balance in his tubular figures, so painstakingly achieved and unequivocally stated. It is perhaps typical of this country that Roberts, in many ways our nearest approach to Leger, should leaven his post-cubist formalism with social comment.
Batcson Mason is the romantic—deliberately theatrical though perhaps most successful when least so. He is an accomplished craftsman, sure of the effect at which he is aiming and sure of the means at his disposal by which he can express it. The means, however, are often compounded of recollections and reminiscences of his contemporaries. Though the initial impact of many of his pictures is powerful, too often the excitement seems to have been whipped up somewhat artificially.
Prunella Clough, at Messrs. Roland, Browse and Delbanco, is very much part of the same contemporary stream. She is, however, so low-toned and reticent that at first her paint seems to have " sunk " and to be in need of revivifying varnish. This tonality is exactly calculated, nevertheless, and is an integral part of her sometimes fragile and sometimes sonorous but always affecting and evocative colour. The intellectual control she exercises shows itself
in every carefully considered square inch of muted paint. Her human beings too remain concepts upon which she has imposed a decorative structure. Miss Clough can, however, achieve her objects trium. pliantly. She and the gentle, whispering world she inhabits may play
an increasingly important role in English painting.
M. H. MIDDLETON.
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