Art
Sea Air
By SIMON
HODGSON Pedestrian but safe. For ultimately he is required to see, not to judge; and for him a picture has a twofold character; it is a pictorial statement, and it is an artefact. The interrelation of the two processes, one of the eye and mind, the other of the hand, is the critic's subject. Artists, for all their schools and revolutions, whether they work in figurative or non-figurative terms, are basically illustrators, whether of visual facts or visual ideas, who will be judged finally on the sort of temper they betray on their canvases, and —though less importantly—on their means of setting it down, that is their use of and their ability to handle their chosen medium.
On these terms there are new satisfactions to be had on all sides in London at present; a Sickert it the Mayor Gallery, Nicholson at Gimpels, Uccello at the National Gallery, Hit- chens at the Leicester, Picabia at Roland Browse and Delbanco. There are also three exhibitions which repay very detailed attention. Jack Smith has a large exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. It is still difficult to decide what he is, though for a painter so young categories are surely premature. The present writer must admit to having been consistently wrong about Jack Smith's painting for the last seven years. It seemed once that the horrific infants stumping across barren acres of sackcloth, and coloured in turpentine starved of life and pigment, had an air of deadly finality about them. His most recent work has moved away from that mood and his paint and his plaster reliefs are luxuriant sometimes to ugliness. But the cold realities he tries to capture remain precise, distant and per- sonal. The concern is still with light, light which does not illumine objects, but through which objects and people may be dimly discerned whose character is determined by the character of the light itself. If this does not always work it often achieves great beauty, and a sort of all-of-a-pieceness which, by half-blinding one, produces sensations of cold spaces of sea and air which are almost terrifying in their loneliness and their grasp on the imagination.
As cool, but prettier and less active, are the wax reliefs which Mr. Michael Ayrton is show- ing at the Leicester Galleries. The wax, in light, coloured relief, has applied to it wax figures almost in the round, or bones, pebbles or bits of glass. The effect has a strange sea charm and can be dramatically decorative. It will be interesting, in a future article, to compare these to the paintings by Mr. Ayrton which have just come on view at the Redfern Gallery. Also at the Leicester, Mr. Robert Banks is showing drawings of Italy, all of great precision and charm, but washed in a rather angry china-tea colour. Nevertheless, his detail—the character of his handwriting when he is working inside the formal and exacting necessities of architectural drawing—has flow and a very masculine grace and solidity and an amused eye for tiny comment.
The Marlborough Gallery has a crowded survey of nineteenth- and twentieth-cen- tury big names, which includes a hideous Cizanne with two other lovely Cezannes—one a water-colour, the other the much-illustrated Le Garcon Couche, where the slumped figure in its imbalance is the focus of the formal and stately setting. There are also a Ldpine of subdued and beautifully judged tones, a Delacroix, a fine fauve Vlaminck, Moore sculptures, a lot of small, in- teresting but ugly bits and pieces of Gauguin, and an abominable flower piece by Van Gogh. The joy of thi exhibition, apart from the Cezannes, is a pale and beautiful Bonnard of a farm in the Ile de France. In the far room is a bronze reclin- ing figure by Moore, a preliminary cast for his UNESCO commission. The huge heave of its flanks seems on the point of bursting through the walls of its small cage, and one may hope to see it soon in a more generous setting. Here its mass is claustrophobic. The Burra water-colours at the Lefevre Galleries have been given an extended showing. They are vast but have a weight; which has nothing to do with size, all but unique for the medium. Oversize vegetables lour from acid depths of leaf and weed, and often frankly surrealist motifs are woven into nightmare kitchen-gardens. They are all as ugly as a goitre or carbuncle, but they have a form of staying power, an ability to catch the eye and not let it go which is a feat, if one hesitates to call it a virtue.
One note : until July 12 a retrospective Lowry exhibition is showing at the Manchester City Art Gallery.
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