CONTEMPORARY ARTS
ART Ginner. (Tate Gallery.) THE history of English painting is a sort of switchback, with headlong swoops into troughs of what Professor Waterhouse has called 'inspissated insularity,' followed by long, slow climbs to regain the wider vistas of the European tradition. At the moment we are nearing a hump, and this particular climb began in the decade before the First World War, when the acceptance of French standards began to assume the proportions of a movement. Sickert arrived back in London in 1905 and immediately found himself at the centre of a group which Included Lucien Pissarro, Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman. From 19 Fitzroy Street there emerged an opposition to the New English Art Club—first in the form of the Allied Artists' Association, then in 1910-11 (more or less coincidentally with Fry's Post- Impressionist . Exhibition) the Camden Town Group, and subsequently the London Group. Arriving in London at the psycho- logical moment of 1910 from a childhood and youth spCnt in France, oame Charles Ginner (1878-1952), a memorial exhibition of whose paintings and drawings has now been brought to the Tate Gallery by the Arts Council.
This is Ginner's niche in history. Alone of the three Gs he survived the second decade of the century, to become in time a CBE and an ARA. To an unusual degree he remained faithful to his early aims, but a younger generation must often have wondered at his embroidered impasto in Burlington House and found so modest a revolutionary strangely remote. Ginner was really a Pre- Raphaelite born fifty years too late. He had a Ruskinian sense of honour where the observation of nature was concerned (giving every part of a drawing or painting a Simultaneous immediacy) but knew, by intelligence and upbringing, where the true tradition of his own time was to be found. The result was a very English comprOmise. Ginner's confessed admiration was for Van Gogh, but the meticulously laboured texture of his own paint was as dead as Van Gogh's was pulsatingly alive; Ginner was a pleasant, plummy colourist with a nice sense of rich, muted hues, but he was never a daring one, or capable of the imaginative leap which can set a picture by, say, Matisse singing; and he had a sense of pattern and solid construction rather than of composition, so that the fragmentation of touch and the flattening of form he employed were in fact close to those of the" neo-impressionists' he affected to despise, but were without their monumentality of design. Shown the top half of the 1911 Café Royal, one might judge the painter to be Jewish and from Eastern Europe, but for the, most part, seen now, rope, but paintings and drawings seem extraordinarily English, with all the soft, atmospheric greys of our waterlogged Ornate.
Brick by conscientious brick he built his walls, leaf by leaf his trees. Rain may slantwise score a vista, but neither light nor shadow enters the embroidered twi- light of Ginner's silent world. It is notable indeed that some of his most successful paintings—like those of Flask Walk or Claverton Street—show townscapes muted by snow.
M. H. MIDDLETON
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