ART
BY the time this note appears the Vienna pictures will be on view at the Tate. Let me, in the meantime, take advantage of a momentary lull to mention a few of the other exhibitions in danger of being drowned in the thunder of the big guns of the foreign invasion. Or, rather, of the old masters—for work from abroad seems con- spicuous in many places at the moment. Some delightful Steers may be seen at the Adams Gallery ; some excellent things in a mixed show at the St. George's Gallery ; and at Twenty Brook Street some derived but promising paintings by a young artist, James Hull. But Sigmund Pollitzer's glittering pen-drawings (some reversed white upon a coloured ground by some private alchemy with walnut stain) share the Hanover Gallery with the agreeable abstracts, somewhere between Miro and Wadsworth and Tunnard, of the American Charles Howard. The collection of Degas drawings and sculptures at Roland Browse and Delbanco's cannot be omitted from the list. Gimpel Fils are showing oils by Andre Marchand, a younger Parisian who draws sustenance from Picasso, Braque and Matisse, and whose main claim upon our affections is a pleasant colour-sense that sometimes works minor miracles with reds and greens.
* * And, of course, at their Suffolk Street Galleries, the R.B.A. have generously given a whole room of their summer show to too recent paintings by their Honorary Member, De Chirico. De Chirico is a man of genius, who has produced work which places him among the most important and influential painters of the century—work which has already outlived that of most of its imitators. To his new crusade against " modernistic " intellectuals, critics and dealer— which he bases on a return to the old masters and disapproval of the industrialisation of the colour-merchant—we would do well to turn the other cheek. Notwithstanding passages of technical skill in the self-portraits and still-lifes of the current exhibition, however, the wriggling calligraphy of these fancy-dress, cloak-and-dagger affairs can scarcely be heralded as the key to a new golden age of painting. * * What an extraordinary contrast when one turns to the Redfern Gallery, to the retrospective exhibition of work by Wyndham Lewis, born four years earlier than De Chirico but still something of a skeleton in Britannia's cupboard, with the power to spread alarm and confusion whenever the door is opened by mistake. An event this, for I doubt whether any but the artist's friends have seen so many Lewis drawings and paintings together under one roof before. They are of their period intensely. One can trace affinities galore—with De Chirico even, though of course the curved, metallic forms of Vorticism related directly, not to the Scuola Metafisica, but to Marinnetti's Futurism. Is it possible to assess the real stature of Wyndham Lewis by this exhibition ? I don't know. His early work remains historically surprising ; some of his later academically so. His distaste for the medium of paint as such mars and harshens many of his pictures, as his insistence upon red-brown limits his colour schemes. As a graphic artist, however, he has produced, it seems to me, portraits as fine as any small-scale drawings done in this century. That he has much to teach us some younger con- temporaries have made clear. Those who admire his writings and those who admire his pictures will both, I suppose, continue to regret that he did net choose to canalise his ebullient talents in the
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