ART
HOUSING Mr. Topolski is like caging a whirlwind. One almost expects the Leicester Galleries, like a Disney shack containing Donald Duck in a tantrum, to suffer from the tumultuous vigour within. None of your niminy-piminy stuff here ! Humanity seethes across a world canvas, the emotional impact heightened with every flashing brush stroke, every nervou3 scribble. Vitality is an admirable quality in itself and doubly so in a grey world of austerities. And yet ? Topolski the roving reporter—was it really like that or has the news been distorted just a little ? That tabloid headline—is it really warranted ? And Topolski the painter—does the vitality only serve to conceal a lack of discipline ? Do form and formal values go by the board too frequently in an essentially hit-and-miss technique ? My own feeling is that the passing years will cause much of the rhetoric to sound hollow, many of the apocalyptic visions flam- boyant. What, then, will be left? The most enduring qualities of his great gifts may be found, to my mind, in his drawings, where the need for documentation has imposed its own discipline. Here, in the faces and figures of the famous and the dispossessed, may be found brilliantly displayed a witty and profound grasp of character and that sensitive, expressive line which is his own especial handwriting. Gwen John's talent, as revealed by the memorial exhibition of her work at Messrs. Matthiesen's gallery, was of a very different order. A pupil of Whistler, friend of Rodin, Rilke, Maritain, she did work which has been overshadowed in this country by that of her brilliant brother, for she lived abroad and was disinclined to exhibit. Neither was she greatly interested, one gathers, in the work of her contem- poraries, and her own drawings and paintings reflect the resultant sequestration from-the extremes of the last half century. They reveal a sensitive nature of great integrity, fine in the French sense, gentle and womanly. The best of her drawings of children catch exquisitely an elusive pathos ; her greatest achievement, fittingly, is her own self- portrait, which is a minor masterpiece.
Other current exhibitions include some breezy watercolours and gouaches by Roland Suddaby at the Leger Galleries (you can almost smell the grass after the shower); some very personal work by Vera Cuningham at the Adams Gallery ; pastels and drawings by Josef Herman which catch one aspect of the Ystradgynlais miners that form his subject with considerable authenticity, and work, all executed before 1921, by William Ratcliffe, a founder member of the Camden Town Group—both these at Messrs. Roland, Browse and Delbanco ; while the Phoenix Gallery is showing paintings by a group of youngsters at cut-price rates between three and fifteen guineas apiece.
M. H. MIDDLETON.
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