Regional and Romantic
I SUGGESTED in my previous article that Josef Herman's images of human labour (and I do not count him a Social Realist as the title of the notice stated) were beginning to suffer from the lack of local particularity. L. S. Lowry, on the other hand, who is holding a show 'of new work at the Lefevre Gallery enjoys both the advantages and disadvantages of being a regional painter. I have no doubt that those who share his Lancashire environment are constantly affected by what is, to them, the intimacy and exactitude of his observation; his pictures describe northern industrialism in the language of a parish conversation, in which a speaker has only to indicate the bare outlines of an anecdote and its protagonists, for his hearers will be able to fill all the empty spaces with physical and human detail. Lowry puts down a scene in a stark, unsophisticated short- hand, reducing things to their essential out- lines; he does not, like Utrillo, explore, savour, and elaborate the elusive colours of a city street, but bluntly forces them into a fixed range of greys, brick reds, ochres, and reveals
only the texture which appears when he paints on his thick white undercoat. He sees people as a scuttling Lilliputian horde or, if he moves in closer, stamps upon the individual an expression derived from a friendly system of caricature. His fellow Lancastrians can, I am sure, till in the gaps as some rider to hounds may be able to transform the pin-figures of an Aiken print, but as a Southerner I cannot supply memories or associations and simply as images of an urban scene or the human comedy Lowry's work is without the pulse or complexity of life and has little constructive interest. The present exhibition does not sug- gest that, as the years pass, the artist is enriching his observation or his pictorial powers.
Three of the paintings in the Ceri Richards exhibition at the Redfern Gallery are derived from poems by Dylan 'Thomas and Vernon Watkins, being not illustrations, but rather the result of a meditation upon the poets' themes in the same way that the memory of a bee- keeping friend has inspired a series of widely differing pictures based upon this occupation and its attributes. Richards is unique among British painters of this kind, the romantic, poetic kind I mean, in possessing a fine pictorial gift, so that the interior image is not, as in the case of Sutherland, for instance. laboriously illustrated with a leaden hand, but forces its way on to canvas in terms of an imagery which is sometimes elusive in its literary meaning but has great formal vitality and precision. Richards is a very tine draughts- man—look at the naked figure in the Dylan Thomas picture or at the tense banner- like flutter of red forms against a yellow back- ground in the last of the bee-keeper series, a passage in which the opposition of colour exactly echoes the lively movement of the line. In fact it is just this power as a draughtsman and as a colourist which holds together his less successful experiments in the field of ideas, and constantly reconciles me to the variety of his work. This variety is reminiscent not so much of Picasso to whom, with Matisse, Richards is greatly indebted, but of Paul Klee. for a change in his pictorial language is not the result of some stylistic experiment, but is determined by the quality and demands of the theme which, for the present, obsesses him. I must also mention, however briefly, the pictures by Erich Kahn at the same gallery. Like Richards he is both a passionate and an educated artist who works in the following of Kokoschka and for that reason may not find his due appreciation here. This is also a show not to be missed.
BASIL TAYLOR
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