Art
THERE have been many opportunities of seeing Van Gogh's work during the last few years in London, but there has been nothing so illuminative of his development as the present first-rate show at the Leicester Galleries. Van Gogh was a genius so erratic that the borderline between sanity and insanity was very faintly marked, and much of his best work is the fruit of the times when his brain, for ordinary purposes, was the least lucid.
At the Leicester Galleries it is easy to trace the other influences which affected him before his discovery of Japanese prints opened up the path along which he, was to find the motive inspiration of his painting. A copy of Hiroshige and the background of Woman at a • Café Table illustrate the beginnings of his Japanese enthusiasm in the Paris period. Van Gogh never quite forgot his love of Japan. It can be seen very clearly in Arles, with Irises in the foreground. He was intoxicated with the sparkling atmosphere and the rich colour of the countryside of Provence, and he worked continuously. To this we owe such great pictures as The House of Vincent at Arles, Gaugin's Armchair, Boat on the Beach at Saintes-Maries and The Sea at Saintes-Maries. Land- scape with Rabbits—a delicious study of the tragic St. Remy period, when the asylum authorities gave him every facility for painting—shows that even when mad he was still a great painter. How great he was can be seen in the
a Fields at Anvers : Approaching Storm, that was amazing shortly before he committed suicide. Of this, he wrote to his brother: "Once back here I set to work again—though the brush almost slipped from my fingers, and knowing exactly what I wanted, I have since painted three more big canvasses."
To accompany Van Gogh, the Leicester Galleries provide a delightful collection of lithographs by Toulouse-Lautrec, Maillol, Gaugin, Pissarro, and others. There is, too, on view Mr. Dobson's large seated female figure in bronze, called Truth. This is his most ambitious work up to date. It has many of the qualities of great sculpture—of even the greatest—but something seems lacking—something so in- tangible that it is difficult to put a name to it. It is undoubtedly a very considerable piece of work, and it is satisfactory to note that the Contemporary Art Society has subscribed half the sum required for its purchase and is endeavouring to persuade admirers of sculpture to provide the remainder in order to purchase it for the nation.
Important as Truth may be, it is overshadowed as a great work of art by Mr. Epstein's monumental "Madonna alid Child," which is shown at the Knoedler Galleries together with a collection of new drawings by Epstein. The drawings, over forty in number, are so similar that their effectiveness is marred by this apparent rather than real reiteration of subject—reclining Indian girls for the most part. In any case, their proximity to the Madonna seems irrelevant and out of place. But the group itself is so noble in conception and in imaginative treatment that criticism is superfluous and almost impertinent. • How this great sculpture can arouse resentment passes understanding. It possesses dignity and power with which the world has been unfamiliar since the Renaissance. Its one fault is perhaps that the Child, in contrast to the astonishing vitality of the Madonna, has slightly the air of a puppet.
Another remarkable work of Mr. Epstein's forms the chief interest of the exhibition of open-air sculpture by members of the London Group which is being held on the roof garden of Messrs. Selfridge, Limited, until the end of August. This Is a portrait bust of Mr. Paul Robeson, which seems to me to be almost as good as sculpture can be. Mr. Epstein, like Van Gogh, knows what he wants to do and does it. Mr'. Maurice Lambert's Bather, in bronze, and Group on a Hill, in lead, and Mr. John Skeaping's black marble Tom stand out from the rest of the sculptures. There are a lot of tiresome little bits—animals and memorials for dead cats—which can be of no use except to clutter up the garden, but, on the whole, the exhibition is interesting—if only that it shows an attempt to educate people into a, knowledge of the possibilities of sculpture in wood, bronze, lead, and stone in the open air.
Mr. Gerald Reitlinger's exhibition of paintings in Sussex; North Africa, and Tahiti at the Redfern Gallery marks a considerable advance on his last show. He has become much more assured and much more mature. His best pictures are the landscapes of the Marsh, Rother Levels, Idea, Stone Cliff, On Romney Marsh, and The Horseshoe Meadow. Mr. Reitlinger has soaked himself with the atmosphere of the Marsh, and these cold, grey-green landscapes, conveying a sense of the space and loneliness of this enchanted corner of England, are admirable. An earlier but equally satisfactory Sussex painting is Laker's Farm. His paintings of Tahiti are memorable for their fine colour and lack of that sentimentality which seems to settle like a blight on English artists who have the temerity to cross the Equator.
There is an exhibition, too, of miniatures and water- colours by Constantine Somov at Prince Vladimir Galitzine's Gallery, which is extremely witty and entertaining. Somov was one of the founders of the group known as "The Artistic World," which in pre-War days at St. Petersburg rather inclined towards the left. In 1919 he issued the famous Book of the Marquise, and he has also illustrated Manon Lescaut with exquisite drawings. His pictures have great unreality and equal charm. They are a kind of unholy marriage between Watteau and the Russian Ballet which is at once extraordinarily naive and extraordinarily sophisticated. Their spirit is an eighteenth century of the imagination : it is impossible to approach them too seriously ; they are just the expression of a strange and
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