ART
QurrE the most impressive and exciting event of recent weeks has been the re-opening of seventeen more galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where it is now possible to form an adequate picture of Sir Leigh Ashton's post-war efforts. The last fifteen or twenty years have seen a complete revolution in museum techniques, and since 1945 the directors of our national collections have been seeking to inform the return of their collections to normal conditions with this new spirit. At the V. and A. this has meant breaking down
the old classification of objects by material, and the rearrangement of the museum's finest specimens into " primary collections" that represent more rounded portraits of period and developing style. (The newly opened galleries, covering late Gothic and Renaissance art, are less radically mixed than some of the earlier.) It has also meant vastly improved standards of showmanship and display— which will eventually, one hopes. be applied equally to the study collections, under the old classifications, on the first floor. Have our standards of taste grown tarnished during the long incarceration of so many touchstones ? My own visual memory, at all events. could scarcely jump the last twelve years. I was astonished by the riches displayed at South Kensington, and found my first visit for some months a tremendously exhilarating experience. Attenuated little 'figures swarming stiffly over street and square. grimed from their work or dark in their sober Sunday clothes, black notes in a pallid world—here is L. S. Lowry again at the Lekvre Gallery. Lowry is one of the very few English artists to have evolved an entirely personal statement about the urban romantic, and it is interesting to compare his half-naive, half-deliberate evoca- tions of Lancashire with the Hammersmith of Ruskin Spear, in the latter's first one-man show at the Leicester Galleries. Lowry figures are the result less of observation than of sympathy
and understanding ; his settings are lit by the indeterminate light of the imagination. Spear sets out to catch the evanescent moment—the last minutes of sunlight in the dying day, the rich jollity of pot' life, the glitter on the bar-pulls. He is immensely professional, and applies his paint with a relish that communicates itself to the onlooker. (A teacher of my student days used to refer to " the half-crown touches "—the accents of light and dark and pure colour that come in the very final stages of making a painting. Rockln Spear's is almost an exhibition of half-crown touches.) His accents are sometimes too forced, his vision owes much to Sickert, hilt Spear represents academic painting at its best.
M. H. M IDDLETON.
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