Arts
Doing the honours
John McEwen
Paule Vezelay (Tate Gallery, till 22 May) Lawrence Cowing (Serpentine Gallery [Arts Council], till 24 April; Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, 7 May to 4 June; Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, 11 June to 17 July; Plymouth City Art Gallery, 23 July to 27 August)
Fiftieth Birthday Choice, a tribute to Edward Lucie-Smith (Leinster Fine Art, 9 Hereford Road, W2, till 30 April)
Ben Nicholson, etchings (Waddington Graphics, 31 Cork Street, WI, till 23 April) Picasso (Mayor Gallery, 22A Cork Street, WI, till 29 April)
I-Daule Vezelay was born M. Watson-
Williams, but after the first world war she went to Paris to find artistic inspiration and was so carried away that in 1922 she adopted a French name the better to iden- tify with the School of Paris modernists, whose work she had so much come to ad- mire. This was clearly a brave thing for a young English artist to do in those days. As she wrote in an English magazine of 1922: 'Outside Paris it is hardly an exaggeration to say that Modern Art is treated more har- shly than the illegitimate child. In Paris, by people who should know of these things, it is regarded as likely, if wedded with sinceri- ty, to give birth to everything of value in the art of the future.' Since the war Paule Vezelay has lived once more in England and is still active as an artist today, on the verge of her 91st birthday. This little retrospec- tive, admirably catalogued by Ronald Alley, Keeper of the Tate's Modern Collec- tion, (Tate Gallery Publications £2), shows her progressing from youthful depictions like `Elenora and Dolly in their Dressing Room' to the abstraction of form and space that has been her artistic concern for half a century. Competence, especially in the form of her early watercolours, is revealed from the outset, and a glimmer of inven- tiveness emerges in the boxed arrangements of taut thread that preoccupied her in the Fifties, but it is artistic advocacy rather than output that makes her worthy of the honour of this exhibition.
'Sir Lawrence Gowing', writes Joanna Drew, the Arts Council's Director of Art, 'is singularly distinguished as a writer, a professor of painting and an adviser to the nation on the arts. However, the bonding principle in his life has been painting .. • that is, the actual painting of pictures. He was born in 1918, has been Slade Professor of Fine Art, in succession to Sir William Coldstream, at University College since 1975, was knighted last year; this exhibition of educational competence in matters of portraiture and landscape, and fitful pur- suits of fashion in more recent times, Is most understandable when taken as a celebration of Sir Lawrence's career as a whole. He early plumped for writing and administration, fitting painting, as best he could, into an increasingly busy life, and can only be congratulated on having made the right choice.
It adds a welcome touch of jollity to the critic's round to find the birthday of one of
his colleagues being properly and officially celebrated. The critic is Edward Lucie- Smith, the birthday his 50th, and to honour man and event Leinster Fine Art have presented him with (for a critic) that nicest of presents, the freedom to select an exhibi-.. tion without any strings attached. In the event he has chosen a number of 50th- birthday portraits of himself by Kitaj and Others, two print suites respectively by Michael Rothenstein and the Mexican artist Feiciano Bejar in which he has collaborated as a poet, work by foreign artists previously unshown in London and further work by, on the whole, lesser-known English artists. The result is an unsnooty mixture of arts and crafts, the mood light-hearted. Some People will know of Lucie-Smith as a poet and poetry editor, others as a biographer of Joan of Arc and historian of 'Piracy', most as a broadcaster and writer on art. Long live his eclecticism.
The most concentrated area for art galleries in this country is London's Cork Street, and from now on (the scheme began last week) they will be concertedly staying open on Thursdays till 8p.m. Waddington Galleries are the most propertied of Cork Street establishments and they have a nicely varied selection of exhibitions at the mo- ment, comprising etchings by Ben Nichol- son from the mid-Sixties, a memorial tribute of Jack Yeats's paintings and a one- man show of new paintings by one of the most internationally fashionable contem- Porary artists of the last year or so, the Ger- man Markus Liipertz. Nicholson's refine- ment can all too often become 're- fainment', and his undoubted good taste tends to pall unless his line is, literally, at its most incisive. His purest 'reliefs' have the edge on his paintings, and so do his etchings on his drawings. These Sixties examples of familiar Nicholson themes — architecture, still-life, landscape — show him at his best. The present Director's father, the late Vic- tor Waddington, was a close friend of Jack Yeats, and the Yeats exhibition is a tribute to that memory. Yeats's busy use of palette knife and colour works best in this selection When depiciting prancing horses or melan- CholY Irish faces. Skies, landscapes and backgrounds, all too often a smeary mess, eldorn reveal his talent for small and fluid Intricacies.
Ltipertz is the least showy, the most stolid, of the 'new' (he is in his forties) Ger- Man painters. Seven large canvases adorn
the gallery four of them are predom- Mantly grey oils of a standing male nude Il.gure about life size; three, collectively en- titled 'Amor and Psyche', are a medley of til.aPes in heavy but various colours on even !",Igger canvases. The largeness is what gives these pictures their authority, and the ap- r:Trent ease of their manufacture. In terms vot style and composition they are conser- s ative to the point of academicism. Per- 11alitY comes with sinister twists of sub- icee, t: the figure's arms sometimes appear ,11°PPed of hands; among the abstract raPes lies an apparently shiny and spiky actus. There is a determined lack of
.elegance, an absolute absence of tenderness. LiIpertz has achieved a mood as a painter, as this exhibition further con- firms, though as yet to no very fixed end.
Best exhibition in the street is a remarkable selection of Picasso paintings at the Mayor Gallery. The earliest dates from when he was 24, the last from when he was 90, but what is most interestingly revealed is how little his art changed, at its most spon- taneous, over the years.
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