ART
EDWARD BURRA'S new exhibition at the Leicester Galleries—his fifth —shows no startling developments, nor any noticeable weakening of his perverse and powerful talent. Projects for his two most recent stage ventures accompany a series of grey and sometimes lurid street-scenes from Ireland, in which a coarse and gusty satire has for the most part replaced the uncompromising grimness of his war pictures. Certainly his iconography has expanded to embrace one or two new symbols—most conspicuously a black and ominous hob- kettle of immense size—but it is interesting also to see the return of those elements of caricature which were so strong a feature of Burra's earlier work. Personally, I find the subtleties of, say, The Alley, a good deal more rewarding than the shock-value of the Bairnsfather Chad in No. 18. But it is easier to heighten and charge the tensions of tragedy than the relaxations of humour. Pictures worth noting are Ropes and Lorries, Sussex and West of Ireland.
The remaining rooms at the Leicester Galleries are devoted to an admirable exhibition of Victorian romantic painting. Palmer, Calvert and Richmond are shown in some profusion, as are the Pre- Raphaelites and their successors. Of novelty value, if no more, are a Wiltshire primitive and an excellent portrait of a young man by Richard Dadd. Should the visitor's sense of values become dis- torted by the delights of browsing in these nationalistic back-waters, a journey to the nineteenth-century French Masters of Impressionism
at the Lefevre Gallery will restore rum to the main tradition once again.
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Massimo Campigli was one of the more talented Italian painters to leave his country for Paris in the period between the wars. In his work, however, he remained true to his origins, and it was fitting that he should have been given an important place in the Venice Biennale last year. Now, fresh from a show in Paris, he is holding, belatedly, his first London exhibition at the St. George's Gallery, Nearly all the work is recent, but as, in essentials, Campigli hai moved scarcely at all during the last twenty years, and as the oil are backed up wirli a considerable number of drawings and ahoy graphs, a fairly considered judgement may be formed by those seeing his work for the first time. Campigli devotes himself to elaborating endless variations on a single theme—a wasp-waisted symbol of womanhood that looks out upon the world from a reserve of meditai tion. Cogito, ergo sum these hieratic figures seem to say as the reflect upon life, death and time, and as they are multiplied in geometric progression, in rows and tiers and pyramids, to form som delicately elusive fantasy. The crumbly whites and terracottas of Campigli's vision and method go back to Etruscan and pre: Renaissance frescoes, and recall nothing so much as the faded, sun- bleached walls of some disintegrating Italian palace. (It is no( without interest that Campigli himself has undertaken the design of mosaics.) This is surely one of the better shows by a foreign painter Bond Street has given us since the war.
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Down the road Messrs. Wildenstein have labelled eight middle- aged Parisian painters Maitres de Demain. A sweet use of comple- mentaries is one of the common traits which unite these artists as they reflect, oh so discreetly, the Fauvism of the beginning of this century or its antecedents at the end of the last. The best painting comes from Gabriel Fournier (under the shadow of Bonnard) and, most noticeably, from Maurice Brianchon (under the shadow of Vuillard). Brianchon telescopes his tonal values to produce oppres. sive and ominous decorations which are also curiously affecting.
M. H. MIDDLETON.
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