" THE NEW CRITICISM
The Diary of an Art Student of the Nineties. By Alfred Thornton. (Pitman. 6s.) IT is not, alas, likely that a great many of the regular readers of The Spectator survive from the year 1893, when a vast fuss arose over its critic's praise of a picture by Degas. The title given to it was L'Abisinthe : it was one of his finest works, and is now in the Louvre. An artist and his model are seated in a café, one drinking coffee, the other a glass of the then popular aperitif. The guardians of British art and morality jostled one another in the press with denunciations of so sinister a subject, and even that judicious journalist,-Alfred Spender, 'flew the Banner of an outraged Ideal in a series of articles 'for the Westminster Gazette, reprinted under the heading of this review. The rumpus superficially arose from a title which was not the painter's, as Walter Sickert quietly pointed out when the dust was subsiding : it should have been Au Café, and if the scene had been English, and the name Afternoon Tea, there need have been no trouble, except that the painting was so, good. The real grievance was that the " new " criticism was :really old, and the purveyors of popular trash were justly disturbed.
My old friend and ally in the comedy, Alfred Thornton, was an observer in both camps, since Spender was his cousin. He revives that battle long ago in his little book, with much else. He has been a keen watcher in the fray from days when Gauguin began to flutter the doves at Le Pouldu, through our summer with Conder and the Harlands at " The Groz," where The Yellow Book was plotted, through the " Post Im- pressionist " scrimmage to the " Surrealism " of yesterday, and that special pet of his own, the " Subconscious."
For me there is one perpetual distinction between good
painting and bad, and waves of fashion chiefly affect the bad but there is no doubt that in my lifetime there has been ., steady draining away of the content of painting down to the last throes and dregs of a disintegration- by the dissatisfied and ingenious Picasso. A reaction will come, if the picture to survive. Thornton, in his later phases, followed our friend Roger Fry on the exciting road to a Damascus that was never reached ; -but he has returned, in practice, to a less apocalyptic spot, not far away from his starting-point, as the monochrome. reproduced in these pages, agreeably bears witness. These notes, however, by a sensitive diarist, have also their value.
D. S. MACCOLL.
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