Art .
English Painting Ox the occasion of the last exhibition of paintings held by Mr. Mark Gcrtler I wrote in a mood of what can only be called petulance an article in which I taxed hint with not only borrowing from other artists but also putting his loans to bad use, so that his imitations were more disagreeable and more vulgar than the originals. At the first moment of seeing the present exhibition of his paintings at the Leicester Galleries I saw no reason to change my opinion. The impression of going into that small room of paintings was, as an acquaintance of mine put it, like going into a Hell built by Picasso with the help of some other moderns, and decorated by Watts. From all round the room there start out the old familiar forms, the massive nudes of Picasso in 1921, the guitar and distorted guitar-case of the later Cubist paintings, the nudes of Derain slightly overfilling their canvases, and the plaster casts • of incipient Surrealism. All these well-known motives are featured in the paintings, but treated with that peculiar glowing colour scheme charac- teristic of Mr. Gertler which gives one an almost physical sensation of heightened temperature, elsewhere only conveyed by the more succulent paintings of Watts. It may seem fantastic to speak of Watts in front of Mr. Gertler's paintings,
but a piece like Musical Bather (101) has not only the too great warmth of colouring, but also the pomposity or grandiosity, and the richly whipped up impost° of the older painter.
The first impression of the exhibition is liable therefore
not to be favourable, and yet Mr. Gertler is clearly a painter of great seriousness, so that it is worth looking to see whether out of all this hard training under other artists something personal has emerged. And the principal distinction between this exhibition and the last held by Mr. Gertler is that it is possible to discover paintings in which the artist seems to have arrived at a serious personal style. The painting Mandolinist (92) clearly owes much to. Picasso. The par- ticular massiveness of the limbs and the simplification of the forms of the head are in a convention created by that artist, but yet there is something about the painting which is entirely different from anything which is to be found in Picasso. The close-fittingness of the figure into its frame, the peculiar effect of the leg cutting across the lower part of the composition with one of its sides reduced almost to a straight line, the exact observation of light falling on the bust-all these make the painting an individual and personal achievement. It is derivative, but the borrowings have been developed into something original.
In the other room at the Leicester Galleries are paintings
by Mr. C. R. W. Nevinson, an artist of a very different kind from Mr. Gertler. If the latter is disagreeable but serious, the former is facile and frivolous. A wonderful gift for picking up some passing trick and exploiting it without any understanding of its proper application makes of this exhibition an anthology of all the unimportant achievements of English painting for the last twenty years. Some mild imitations of a technique evolved by the hangers-on of Cubism, such as Souvenir de Bretagne (73) ; some insensitive landscapes (41 and 58) in a style in which sensitiveness is the essential for success ; some crudely symbolical paintings in an effetely Catholic manner ; a thin fantasy, Castles in Spain (72)-these are some of the dishes offered to us by Mr. Nevinson.
Another astonishing display of frivolity is to be seen
at the exhibition of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters where skill can be found in most pictures (not in quite all, for instance Mr. Le Maistre's sea pieces) even when prostituted to the cheapest form of sex-appeal, as in Mr. Greenham's Front Row (139). Here are examples of the flashiest and emptiest of fashionable portraits such as Mr. Cohen's (120) ; of the slickest kind of still-life like Mr. Richter's Floral Symphony (371) ; and of the most old-world calendar pictures in Mr. Snell's Woods in Winter (249) and Mr. Lindner's Morning Glow (821). Among all this there stands out one serious work of art, Miss Tyson's Road to TVindrush (124), in which the spectator gasps to find sincerity of execution combined with subtlety of observation.
ANTHONY BLUNT.
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