Round the Galleries.
As the idioms of the twentieth century develop, multiply and converge afresh, the imprecision of the terms we use to describe them by becomes increasingly clear. The sculpture of Zadkine at the Leicester Galleries, the paintings by Peter Lanyon and contemporary Haitians
at Gimpel Fils, by Nicolas de Stael at Matthiesen's, are all, in some degree, " abstract " ; but what diversity that tired word covers.
Lanyon's subject-matter is the emotional impact of Cornish landscape, recreated in compositional terms so subjective as to defy recognition, but richly evocative in colour despite a limited range. His blacks and greys recall the local slate and stone and rock ; his sad greens the dark, damp fertility of the west ; his flashes of cerulean the cold clearness of a clean Atlantic sky. He combines some of the primitive roughness of an Alfred Wallis with the poetic qualities of a Frances Hodgkins, the sense of a painting as a thing-in-itself shown by a Nicholson with the apprehension of the genius loci shown by a Nash or a Sutherland. The strength and discreet vigour of Lanyon's painting cannot always disguise an all-over, simultaneous quality (not unconnected, 1 think, with his addiction for closed, ingrowing shapes), over which the eye wanders, undirected, without coming to a final conclusion. It is, however, partly this very lack of formal finality which gives the work its national character. This is intensely romantic abstraction, as remote from Milan or Paris as can be imagined. Compare Turcato or Santomaso, or de Stael. The latter, on occasions, uses greater quantities of pigment to slighter ends than almost any other painter has done. In his best work (to my mind compositions like Nos. 6, 17 and 18, in which square bricks of heavy paint are built up into a tonal counter- point) the effect is impressive, sensuous and conceptual. No echoes of the natural world disturb the muffled grandeur.
Zadkine, together with Lipchitz and a handful of others, carved out of the fragmentations of the Cubist movement a new language of sculpture. He has always, however, in his own words, " insisted on a poetic climate " in his work, so that, though an impression some- times remains of a rugged and uncouth discipline imposed by the intellect upon an essentially graceful talent, that has always, in the analysis, tempered the aridity of dogma. Such works as the three standing figures in polished brass, and the three running figures (which would make a splendid monument), are valid, personal statements. By his juxtaposition of concave and convex forms, straight lines and curves, by the way sharp edges disappear into rounded surfaces, Zadkine achieves great animation and a leaping, flamelike flicker and thrust. Besides gouaches from the same hand, the Leicester Galleries are also showing prints by Odilon Redon
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