But doubt and scepticism tend to be quashed by the result, which must be admitted to be a very considerable success. The field appears to have been so wide that the artists have been able to select the themes which had most significance for them, and there is a direct continuity in their present with their past work. Even pure landscapes have not been ruled out. It is, in fact, far the best modern exhibition that has graced the walls of the Academy for some time, and the memory of it will still be fresh in the spring.
It is not meant, however, that the Exhibition is full of masterpieces. It contains work that is representative of much of the best English art of to-day, but the keynote of that art is talent, accomplishment, and not genius. And this judgment does not exclude such well-known painters as Sargent, Cameron, Muirhead Bone, Francis Dodd, Clausen, Orpen, Lavery.
I shall, no doubt, be accused of iconoclasm, of indulging in easy destructive criticism; and the term Futurist will be hurled at me with such a lot of prejudicial glue on it that, although it is inapplicable, it will inevitably stick. And I shall be asked if I would consign the whole of the past to the rubbish-heap and abolish all tradition, and so on. The answer is, emphatically and vehemently, no! It is precisely because the past looms so imposing and ever watchful that the late twentieth-century English painters are dwarfed. Place a Muirhead Bone beside a Meryon (the comparison is not irrelevant, because there are definite similarities between the two) and the Muirhead Bone will disappear into the Meryon. Two possible exceptions in the present Exhibition are The Great Crater, Athies (280) and Deniecourt Chateau, Estrées(284). Place a Sargent beside a Manet, Courbet or Velazquez and Sargent's horses beside those of Géricault, and the Sargent loses all vitality. Or, again, neither Steer nor Clausen will stand very prolonged comparison with Constable or even Monet. Practically the whole of English late twentieth-century art is derived from Constable and from the French Barbizon and Impressionist schools, and is inferior to it. The latter is the significant point. This may sound too sweeping, and indeed it probably does leave out of account the few gems which a complete collection would reveal. Still, the fact of it being necessary to hunt for these few gems and not rather to eliminate the few failures would confirm the general judgment. We have never had anything like the great constellation of French nineteenth-century art.
In reaction against the tendency of English Impressionism to degenerate into the pleasant but slipshod æstheticism of a Lavery there is the crude Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis and W. P. Roberts. It had once a negative, destructive, rebellious value, but as a permanent constructive effort it surely is a cul-de-sac, a mere mechanical formula. Before any theory comes into play the primary test is whether a picture really moves us, appeals to us. If Vorticist or Futurist art did this, then no amount of argument refuting their abstract theory could condemn the actual art. But, at any rate, so far as I am concerned, this art has no appeal to me in a picture-frame. Indeed, it seems to me to be becoming increasingly stereotyped, and it is amazing that Mr. Wyndham Lewis should honestly believe in it himself. Mr. Wadsworth's Vorticist design for a house, which was recently exhibited by the Arts League of Service, absurdly unpractical though it was, had far larger possibilities in it.
The most interesting work exhibited by the younger painters is that painted in the more traditional manner—that is to say it is not abstractionist. It is possible that on seeing for the first time the pictures of the Nash brothers, Meninsky, Schwabe, Elliott Seabrooke, one might mistake them for "Futurist" efforts. This is, however, not owing to any distortion or abstraction, but to the fact that they have in common with the abstractionists a certain restlessness of design. Even when allied to absolute truth in representation, this trait might at first sight appear novel and revolutionary. It is, or tends to be, expressive of a new outlook.
Paul Nash's large picture, The Menin Road, is a distinct achievement. It grips one's attention. Yet it is overloaded, the incident, the drama of the landscape is piled on too thickly. John Nash's Over the Top, on the other hand, attracts attention because of its very bareness and simplicity. On a small section of a snow-covered front men are stumbling out of a jagged muddy trench into rolling fog cloud. Yet in spite of its success in convincing us that that is exactly how it was, the picture lacks intensity and depth. We are grateful to Mr. Nash, as also to Mr. Sargent, for having spared us the harassing agonies of the typical old-fashioned Academy war-picture. But neither has altogether succeeded in providing the real substitute. What such a picture would be like still remains to be seen. For it has not yet been painted.
The distinctive characteristics of the younger school, its sense of actuality, of lively conflicting movement, its combination of realism with rhythm, are summed up in Stanley Spencer's Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smoll, in Macedonia. In spite of certain possible faults of perspective, this is a thoroughly good picture. But although about a scene in the war, it is not of the war. It contains an inner civilian joyfulness expressed in unhampered, rhythmical activity. Equal praise must be bestowed on Henry Lamb's Irish Troops in the Judaean Hills Surprised by a Turkish Bombardment, which possesses the same sense of concrete (not abstract) dynamic form.
The New English Art Club
There are two large pictures by Stanley Spencer at the New English Art Club Exhibition which confirm the impression that there is an immense promise in his art and already considerable attainment. It has such depth and breadth, such spontaneity and comprehensiveness. Boggle as we may at certain neo-primitive tendencies in his figures, at certain humorous irrelevancies in their occupations, overriding and almost justifying these eccentricities there is the fact that these two pictures do immediately and irresistibly heighten and intensify our consciousness: they give us a "silent and instantaneous flash of collusion with beauty." The picture Swan Upping at Cookham is freer from the static archaistic convention than the pseudo-Biblical composition, The Sacrifice of Zacharias, which is, nevertheless, because of the landscape background, equally fascinating. In the former it is the rigid mask of the woman lifting the cushion out of the punt and the distortion of the shoulders of the dark-faced gentleman that provoke criticism: in the latter nearly all the figures are a little inexplicable, except (and here the realist will demur strongly) the gentleman who is footing it gently towards Zacharias and the Florentine gentleman who is indulging in a graceful and somewhat reminiscent dancing gesture. These two are an inevitable part of that luxuriant and yet refreshing scenery. Pre-Raphaelite will doubtless be the derogatory term applied to Mr. Stanley Spencer, and it is true that he has affinities with that group which started with such promise and then proceeded to develop its vices more fully than its virtues. But Spencer has not got these particular vices, an inordinate love of photographic detail and a languishing sentimentality. His work suggests, rather than actually contains, an infinite wealth of detail, and it is swept with fresh country air precluding any Pre-Raphaelite hothouse languor.
Nor must we fall into the error of demanding realistic character studies from an artist who does not see people from that point of view at all. His outlook is nearer to that of Blake: his people are embodiments of universal emotions, they are penetrated with a sense of religious awe and beauty. Or, rather, this is what they would be if his expression were to reach its full maturity and get rid of its present archaistic obsession. His figures might still be stiff and intense, but we would not notice this because of their profound significance.