I WOULD HAVE advised that 'The Lost Image'— an exhibition
of paintings by tachists, children and apes at the Royal Festival Hall—should not be missed, but for the fact that you cannot obtain admission unless you also buy a ticket for a concert. Quite why an interest in music should be considered a necessary prerequisite for being allowed to see the work of Congo the chimpanzee, of Timothy Vaughan (aged three) and of some students of the Ipswich School of Art is not clear; what is clear is that the rule is ridiculous. My own impression of the exhibits was that Congo is a considerable artist, by modern standards, in his own right; and that one or two of the tachist pictures—though done not by established tachists but by art students (which was surely cheating?) —were attractive. I would have been tempted to buy one of them myself if I had dared to ask how much. The aim of the organiser, Mr. Mervyn Levy, is to make us realise that true act is being ground between the upper (Royal Academy) and nether (action painting) millstones; I am sorry to say that though'I agree with his harsh words about the academicians, I found
some of these action paintings, ape and human, rather agreeable.
IS LORD BEAVERBROOK in his old age finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the Rother- meres? The Daily Express and the Daily Mail, like the two television networks, are finding that cut-throat competition produces uniformity rather than variety. And the Express these days seems to be the paper which is caught tying its running shoes when the pistol fires. When the Mail's Noel Barber arrived at the South Pole, the Express immediately set out to prove that anybody could go there. This week the Mail an- nounced the serialisation of a book about Peter Townsend, and the Express immediately cleared a front-page column to ask, 'Are you weary of these endless versions of old news about Town- send? Would you instead welcome a book that discloses new facts about the Queen and her life today? The Daily Express prefers the new to the old. Watch for tomorrow's announcement.' My answers would be 'Yes' and 'No' respectively. I cannot decide which paper is behaving in the sillier fashion—the Express in stumbling along on the heels of its smaller rival with its pretence that 'this is the story, which was written with the active help of the Queen's closest advisers'; or the Mail in attempting to give some sort of dignity to its sensational gossip by claiming that the serial will 'provide a study of the working of the British Constitution.' The two papers are playing not so much ducks and drakes as Maceys and Gimbles—perhaps they ought to rewrite the famous slogan into 'Nobody but nobody ever
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