Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

guilty of "wilful anarchy and notoriety- hunting." Whilst the critics and their public wallowed in the luxurious but blinding sensation of righteous wrath, a small group of serious artists found in the work exhibited a stimulus and a revelation. At least three of the artists closely connected with this exhibition were represented at Llanelly-Mr. Fry himself, Duncan Grant, and Venessa Bell. Out of the discussions aroused by the exhibition among these artists and their friends was born the doctrine of "significant form," sponsored by Clive Bell in his book "Art". It was discovered that sensitive people could be moved profoundly by combination of purposefully related coloured forms, irrespective of what these forms represented, in just the same way that a musical person is moved by purposefully related sounds. Knowledge of this fact was no new thing; Walter Pater had it when he described architecture as frozen music," and Michael Angelo, when he defined good painting as "a music and a melody, which the intellect only can appreciate During the nineteenth century both the power and desire to create these harmonies of shape had been lost by all save a very few painters. Photographic naturalism, the desire to tell a story," the desire to parade his technical accom- plishment, are all that appear in the work of the average painter of that time. He may interest our curiosity, he may amuse, he may even arouse admiration for the pains he has taken, but hardly ever does he give us the authentic thrill which proceeds from a work of art. Cezanne and the other artists we now call Post-Impressionists sacrificed all inessentials to the end of creating harmonies of shape, of moving the spectator by creating a pictorial equivalent to the music and the melody which moved them when, with an artist's vision, they looked at some portion of external nature. The degree of accuracy with which they portrayed external nature mattered nothing to them; the accuracy with which they recorded this harmony meant everything. The example of their work had a tremendous effect on some of the younger English artists of 1910. There followed a period of discipleship, during which the teaching implicit in the work of the modern French masters was assimilated. Even the ascetic discipline of cubism (the creation of harmonies of purely abstract shapes) was practised for a time in England. Gradually, however, using the strength gained from these French exercises, these artists have gone on to modes of expression both more national and more 1 The Morning Post, 16th November, 1910. personal. The influence of the Cezanne tradition is still present, but the majority of the works produced are no longer likely to be mistaken for anything but the work of British artists. Although Duncan Grant's Still Life at Llanelly made one think inevitably of Derain, yet far oftener his landscapes remind us that he is a fellow-countryman of Constable. The other thirteen members of the London Artists' Associa- tion (at least one canvas by each of whom was shown at Llanelly) have similarly understood and made use of the heritage of Cezanne. Elliot Sea- brooke, the Nashes, and Cedric Morris are also heirs. A certain seriousness and intense artistic sincerity characterises them all. The same can hardly be said of that unreturned prodigal, Augustus John. What his amazing gifts could accomplish when, twenty years since, he was under the influence of Picasso, the small "Romany Folk" in the National Museum of Wales bears witness. The promise of those early days has not been fulfilled. Beside the generation owning Cezanne as its spiritual grandfather there is growing up a younger generation of artists, differing some- what from the last in its quality of feeling, less directly influenced by the French tradition. At Llanelly these were represented by the young Welsh painter, E. David Jones, and by Winifred Nicholson, to whose "Ruby and Chicks" one kept returning-a painting delicate and feminine in its intuitive, rather than reasoned, rightness of form. The two "Still Lifes by E. David Jones, seemed to arouse more blind invective than anything in the exhibition, although they were palpitatingly alive, with a life of their own, not, of course, of the cups and saucers repre- sented. They were Oriental in their type of design, in that they were not so much architectural compositions as sensations in time, in the sense that music is, or a Chinese roll-painting. One's eye wandered along the exquisitely related lines, over the delicate colour-flushes, and slowly one realised the music and the melody of it all. Finally, a word of warning. Among the sculpture at Llanelly was a small bronze figure of a crouching woman, by Aristide Maillol, perhaps the greatest sculptor alive. Beside it the other pieces seemed suddenly tired. Among the paintings there was no work by one of the leading modern Frenchmen to provide a similar touchstone, but had there been, the effect would have been similar, though not perhaps quite so drastic. We need admire and enjoy the pick of contemporary British art no less for having to admit that even at its best it fails to reach the heights attained in France by Matisse, Derain, Picasso, or Bonnard.