ART
Youth and Assurance
IT would not be fair to blame the young artist of today for the com- petitive pressure which forces him to seek finality of self-expression at a very early age. Unless he can hit the jackpot within his last year at school or his first couple of years after that, he might as well resign himself in most cases to that little job with the B.B.C. or dishwashing at a Corner House. The results are not, however, altogether healthy. We are breeding a race of prodigies, before whose pronunciamentos one cannot but bow' the knee—aWed, respectful, and even a little jealous perhaps. But to reach the end of the road in the mid- twenties is a form of suicide, and, indeed, one can think of more than one young artist in history whose early demise has done more than anything to keep perennially fresh a promise that could probably never have been further developed.
Some months ago Alan Reynolds scored a phenomenal and resounding (and deserved) success with his third exhibition at the Redfern Gallery. Messrs. Charles and Peter Gimpel have tried to trump• this coup with a fistful of Donald Hamilton-Frasers, of which five-sixths were sold before the exhibition opened. ' Mr. Fraser is twenty-four, and his brilliance and 'assurance, like those of Mr. Reynolds, are enough to daunt most older artists. He practises, as those who have followed him through a succession of mixed exhibi- tions will remember, a rich, romantic, free kind of abstraction which is nevertheless full of evocations of visual experiences and natural phenomena. Blue Sea with Distress Rockets and Garden at Night with Water are two of his titles. His painting is rich to the point of Wagnerian, romantic to the point of Turneresque, by reason of the full chromatic and tonal range he employs, the sumptuous cuisine of his paint, the sense of excitement he engenders—like that which we experienced as children when first we saw the night marl come through in a shower of sparks and ragged steam. It is the con- temporary, whittled-down version of that fire-in-the-flood which Sir Kenneth Clark has called the painter's most powerful weapon. Since Fraser finally decided, some years back, which of a number of styles he wished to pursue, his work has strengthened immeasurably; gained in depth and discipline, it may be, from the example of the London showing of De Stael. It is hard to see how much further he can now push it. Also at Gimpel's are the six Young Contemporaries chosen this year for further consideration. Two schools, the Slade and St. Martin's, account each for three of the artists (one of whom has even attended both schools) and there are signs of group-activity in certain traits common to Hamilton-Fraser, Peter Kinley (who has already shown in one of these exhibitions) and Norman White. Of the latter pair, Kinley is the more assured: his palette knife "land- scapes," constructed of loosely connected horizontal strata of reds, yellows, greys and blacks, owe a good deal to De Stael, but have greater recession and atmosphere, are less monumental, than those of the Paris artist. Denis Higbee's still-lifes pay homage to Matisse; Bernard Cohen shares with• his elder brother a somewhat Baconian sense of mystery in his large, foggy, grey street scenes, of which No. 5 is the best. Two sculptors, both of very real talent, complete the half-dozen. Ralph Brown shows, in his simplification of surface, traces of those archaisms we associate with the contemporary Italian sculptors. His Tragic Group and big Man Shearing Sheep are most excellently considered in their interplay of related angles and surfaces, space and mass—the latter especially is satisfying from every view: point. Rosemary Young has looked with profit at Germaine Richier and Giacometti; her whiskery drawings are quite personal.
At the A.I.A. Gallery in Lisle Street, several more young artists are to be seen, of whom Roy Turner Durrant is the best known. His gouache landscapes constructed of every spiky form beloved of sculptors, exhibition designers, furniture, fabric and theatre designers, are prettily turned out with relentless efficiency. Eric Huson shows a series of elaborate pen and wash drawings of formalised nco- romantic fantasy.
M. H. MIDDLETON.
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