ART
THERE is nothing like a newspaper scandal for pulling in the public. Picasso in Provence at the New Burlington Galleries has produced a bigger crowd there than I remember since the Surrealist exhibition fourteen years ago. The Arts Council have collected a symposium of Picasso's output from the years 1945-1948—drawings, paintings, lithographs and bronzes (many of which have been seen before) and ceramics (which have not). The impression is scrappy, com- pared with the Musee d'Antibes, where the massive whitewashed walls, the sun, the fig-tree and the goldfish in the little courtyard, all help to create a setting at once simple and gay. The big panels there, so much part of the building that the screws holding them to the walls are themselves surrounded by circles of paint which form part of the design, echo in their colours the pink tesselated floors and the sea and sky beyond the windows.
In London, the plates and jugs are the thing. This, as has been said, is Picasso at play. The ceramics are gouged, lumpy, often only partially glazed and eccentric in shape. The work is like a breath of fresh air in a generally genteel industry. M. H. MIDDLETON.
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