The Black Country. Drawings by Edward Wadsworth: The Leicester Galleries. (January.)
Mr. Wadsworth has almost found himself in his Black Country pictures, or better he has found a real object which coincides with his particular "vorticist" predilection. Continually is he obsessed with a certain forked-lightning pattern which zigzags over the world. Where it does not he often puts it there and, partially removing the world, leaves a pattern. However, in the slag heaps and belching chimneys and curved canals and splintered roofs of the Black Country, at any rate sometimes, this pattern comes back to earth, and the result is a striking picture. Vorticism and Futurism, in so far as they are art tendencies, represent the scientist and business man of the nineteenth century emerging painfully into emotional expression. Mr. Wadsworth and the "Futurists" have not been the first to discover science and industry artistically, but hitherto stress has been laid on the general impressiveness, the mystery and atmospheric volume of the subject. Mr. Wadsworth's particular contribution concerns the sheer joy in brutal mechanical movement and in the deadly bulk and solidity of industrial products and by-products. His best drawings are of ladle slag heaps, consisting of metallic-looking boulders hurled out into a desolation that yet teems with the energy that made and discarded them.
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We have to congratulate Mr. D. Y. Cameron and Mr. George Henry on their election as Associates of the Royal Academy.
HOWARD HANNAY