LondonAuthor(s): Keith RobertsSource: The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 109, No. 775 (Oct., 1967), p. 598Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/875343 .

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London There are two interesting features about the exhibition of Contemporary Cuban Art to be seen at the Ewan Phillips Gallery (22, Maddox Street) until 7th October. The first is that a Communist state should be supporting progressive trends in paint- ing, rather than the worn-out academic naturalism that is still favoured in Russia. Many of the exhibits, such as the hard edge abstracts in pastel shades of blue, purple and lilac by Luis Martinez Pedro, might have been painted in London or New York, and Amelia Pelaez's Women, with its clear debt to Picasso, might easily have been produced in Paris. This freedom of expres- sion is very welcome, certainly, but it is a pity that it has resulted in a series of pic- tures so smoothly international in flavour. This is the second feature about the show, in which it is very hard to discern anything specifically Cuban, some distinctive quality that one would look for in vain in the paintings being produced in France, Eng- land or the USA. And judged by the in- ternational standards invoked by their style and character, the pictures, though often pleasant, are not particularly dis- tinguished.

The large retrospective exhibition of paintings, water-colours, drawings and wood-engravings by John Nash, to be seen at the Royal Academy until 29th Octo- ber, is nothing if not comprehensive. In no less than 263 items we are invited to trace Mr Nash's development from avant garde (i.e. Post-Impressionist-Cubist) beginnings clearly evident alike in landscape (The Three Carts of 1915) and in war subjects like Over the Top (1918-19), right through to the serene landscape water-colours of re- cent years. There are examples of Mr Nash's work as a book illustrator in the 1920's and 30's, and meticulous drawings of plants; and anyone who has a mind to can follow the artist about the country as he paints now in Buckinghamshire, now in Dorset, and Gloucestershire, in the Bristol Docks and at Bath, and finally in East Anglia, where he settled in 1946.

The continuity of purpose is impressive. For almost fifty years, Mr Nash has been content with domestic landscape, painted on a small scale (average size 25 by 30 ins) ; and it is hardly surprising that his work should seem like a hymn to the picturesque intimacy of the English scene: the late afternoon sun falling over fields of corn, the isolated copse, the country roads and still river, the frozen pond edged with a tracery of winter branches. Very evident affection, moreover, has not been allowed to override purely pictorial considerations.

The pictures are extremely well composed; the French lesson has been absorbed. Again and again, one notices the telling clarity of an outline, the delicate harmony of an arrangement of colour.

Mr Nash, then, holds a strong hand: he has a welcome simplicity of response, affection, good taste, a feeling for com- position and, as the plant studies make abundantly clear, an observant eye. In that case, why should almost everything on view look so dull and flat and empty ? It is puzzling, or, rather, it is difficult to put one's finger on the precise reasons for Mr Nash's failure to rise above the commonplace. For it is not enough to call him academic. Nor is it enough to say that he lacked imagination - so then did Con- stable, who painted many of the same views and adopted similar compositions.

One begins to see the glimmerings of an answer in a remark that the artist's brother, Paul Nash, made to John Rothenstein; "It was I who encouraged Jack to be a painter; and I am still not certain that I did right; I don't know whether he has a painter's imagination". I don't think the word "imagination" is useful in this con- text - and Mr Nash is not in any sense a literary artist - but the broader implica- tions of Paul Nash's comments seem to come near to the truth. George Cukor, the director of Camille, has admitted that the play was such an old warhorse that he wouldn't have dreamt of making the film without Garbo: 'but somehow that ill- starred, tainted creature is something she has in her face, and that makes it unique'.

Now it is precisely this kind of subtle tissue, a fibre indivisibly compounded of individuality, empathy and stylistic ex- pression, that Mr Nash as an artist lacks. It is of course a gift. And without this di- vine spark, his beautifully prepared offer- ing will not kindle. As a result he reaps, quite unfairly, all the disadvantages. The simplifications of form do not transform but solidify his vision; the directness of view, from being a valuable statement about man's relation to nature - which is what Constable makes of it - dwindles into a series of common-place visual cliches; while Mr Nash's lyrical feeling for the countryside takes on the disheartening ob- viousness of an advertisement for ale or cider. He has quite failed to make what is personal artistically expressive.

KEITH ROBERTS

CURRENT AND FORTHCOMING EXHIBITIONS

A major exhibition of the work of Jan Le Witt is being organized by the Polish Ministry of Culture, to take place at the Museum of Modern Art, Zacheta Palace, Warsaw from 6th October to 6th November. Sixty oil paintings as well as drawings, gouaches and tapestries are to be shown.

B.N.

Cubist Art from Czechoslovakia The exhibition of 'Cubist Art from Czecho- slovakia' at the Tate is basically the same as the one mounted in Paris last year, but enormously strengthened by the inclusion of ten works by Kupka. The French Exhibition was designed to show the close ties that existed between Prague and Paris in the first decades of this century, and this is certainly very effectively demonstrated by the paintings on show. It is striking that whereas painters in Vienna and other parts of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy

should have been in close touch with developments in Dresden and Munich, the Czech painters should have gone directly to Paris for inspiration. The answer may well be that the revival of Czech national culture over the previous thirty or forty years produced a resistance to German in- fluences, while a growing sympathy with the liberal ideals of France strengthened the cultural ties between France and Bohemia. The title of the exhibition is slightly misleading, since approximately half of the Czech painters represented have little or nothing to do with Cubism. How- ever, the links between the other half and the French Cubists are strong indeed: no other European country outside France produced such purely Cubist art. It is perhaps not surprising that the exchange of ideas and inspiration was almost entirely one-sided, yet the Czechs put up a most impressive front in the face of strong com- petition, for the quality of the French pictures in the exhibition is superb.

The nucleus of the group of paintings by Picasso, Braque and Derain, now in the Prague National Gallery, was formed by the art historian Vincenc Kramir, who lived in Paris from 1910 to 1913. His resources were limited and as a result the pictures he acquired were all on a personal, intimate scale. But he bought with extra- ordinary taste and discrimination, and by the time he returned to Prague he had amassed one of the half-dozen most im- portant collections of Cubist art of the time. He was most drawn to Picasso, whom he knew and venerated, and one of his first purchases was the tough, sombre Self- portrait of 1907 (Cat. No.I30), a work which set the tone of the rest of his collec- tion: Kramair liked his art serious, re- strained and highly finished. He avoided the more dramatic and frankly experimen- tal side of Picasso's talent, and he bought no synthetic Cubism, probably because he was unable to appreciate the element of fantasy and humour which began to colour Picasso's work at this time. As a result, one is reminded that the analytic phase of Cubism and the steps which led up to it present a period of unprecedented and unparalleled discipline in Picasso's career. I only wish he had bought Braque in equal quantities (half the Braques on show are post-war and were bought by the Czech Government in the early twenties) - it would have been wonderful to see the Picassos matched in number by the works of a painter who was, at the moment, vir- tually his alter-ego. But the oval Violin and Glass of 1910o-I I (Cat. No. I 17) is as fine as any still life of the period, and it is a particularly moving work, reading, as it does, almost as a homage to Cezanne, at a moment when Braque had evolved his first independent and mature Cubist style. The French paintings have travelled very little and have not been as frequently reproduced as those in better-known col- lections, and they look marvellously fresh and vital. They serve to remind one yet again how profound and how enjoyable

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