A LONDON LETTER

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 4, 26 March 1927, Page 15

A LONDON LETTER

New Zealand Novelist Writes of Art And Famous Men (Written for THE SUN.)

Miss Jane Mander, the New Zealand novelist, who was born in North Auckland and has won for herself a distinguished place among British writers, is one of THE BUN'S London correspondents. She will contribute, regularly, articles on art, literature and topics of general interest to Aucklanders. Miss Mander has a crisp, incisive style of writing and is, above all, a fearless critic.

THE year 1927 has already brought us exciting events, and the promise of many more. The greatest international exhibition of paintings held for many years, that of Flemish and Belgian art, has been open for two weeks at Burlington House: the Lener String Quartette Is with us celebrating Beethoven; the stodgy brains of the Philistines are being disturbed by the illustrations for T. K.

Lawrence’s great mystery book; there are numerous other significant exhibitions and musical events; the book deluge is giving us some remarkable volumes; and later on we are promised the Philadelphia Orchestra with its wizard conductor, and the best opera season for 15 years.

According to the catalogue there have been four international exhibitions of Flemish art revious to the present one —that at Bruges in 1902; at the Guildhall in 1906; of the Toison d'Or in 1907; and of the Albert et. Isabelle Exhibition in Brussels in 1910. But no one of these combined all the features of the present, which is said to be the most remarkable international exhibition held in England. Five, foreign governments have lent exhibits: the Belgian, the Austrian, the French, the Danish and the Hungarian. The marvellous series of tapestries from the former Imperial Collection at Schonbrunn, never before exhibited abroad, lent by the Austrian Government (which sent an expert to assist in the hanging), are among the unique features of the great show. The museums and churches of Brussels, Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent, Louvain, Mechlin, Tournai and Liege sent of their treasures. In England, the King, dukes and lesser men contributed from their galleries. while the response from America surpassed all expectations. Wealthy collectors from across the Atlantic made possible the linest group of primitives ever seen in England. The pictures, the tapestries, the drawings, the statuary and carvings till 11 rooms, and their pageantry reconstructs for us a vanished age, and gives us a conception ot genius, faith, patience and love unknown to our own. The whoie thing is at first overwhelming. It was only on a third visit lasting many hours that individual things began to emerge for me out of the panorama of symbolism, figure and colour To begin with, the crowds have been so great (for anything at Burlington House is a fashionable event as well as an artistic one) that it was a matter of continual frustration and irritation to get near the small pictures in the first two rooms. And to do this exhibition rightly one should begin with number one and follow the numbers. I have never been to a picture collection that was better arranged, and have never encountered a more interesting or helpful catalogue. Everything about the affair is right except the hordes of stupid people who exhibit their ignorance and lack of any sense of beauty in front of every masterpiece. But this is a digression. I found the first set of primitives by unknown artists, all lent from Belgium, very delightful. One can always be astonished afresh at the feeling for colour, for composition and decoration possessed by these old painters, at their extraordinary faith, which accepted miracle and legend, and depicted it so seriously and with such loving patience. The queerest, picture in this section is a Last Judgment by an unknown worker of the early fifteenth century, lent by the Belgian Government, and not known previously to its appearance in the Town Hall at Diest. It is a large canvas, with a very stiff and stodgy God at the top centre. On the left is a marvellous Gothic tower, all of gold, with angels flitting about it blowing trumpets. Below God is a group of the apostles, and on his right are more angels blowing to the four corners of the universe. These figures are all conventional enough, it is in the lower half of the picture that the artist has given rein to his grotesque and gruesome fancy. Here the graves are opening—on the left the elect are creeping out, the flesh forming over their skeletons as they emerge looking up hopefully towards God; while on the right the wicked, before they are well out of the tombs, are being seized by the most hair-rais-ing devils I have ever seen. Indescribable things are being done there before our eyes to the damned. This picture attracts all the attention that a modern story °r stunt picture would do. Then we come to the Van Eycks and their period, and begin our enjoyment of the marvellous painting of textiles that is one of the features of their school. How those People did love clothes! Nothing that our modern designers can do can equal the elaborate and dazzling beauty of those old brocades. When our Charles Ricketts gives us opulent costumes for Macbeth it is from these old pictures that the designs come. The old masters knew how to give life to pearls, luminousness to precious stones, astonishing realism to velvet. And one feels that they took more delight in working on gorgeous stuffs than they

did on the curiously smooth and often wooden faces of their madonnas. The first two rooms give a procession of madonnas and saints and donors in which the faces fade, in most cases, into insignificance in the riot of design and the detail of landscape background. Contrasted with this ornateness we have the simplicity of some of the portraits. There is a Petrus Christus, a wonderful picture of an Englishman, Edward Grimston, the earliest one I remember to have seen. Its clothing is simple but lovely, and the background relieved only by a shield. To me the most moving things in this first room are the Roger van der Weyden madonnas and portraits, all with plain or merely gilt backgrounds. There are 18 of these priceless things set beautifully together. An extraordinary one, new to me, called the portrait of an elderly woman, and lent by John D. Rockefeller, jun., is so beautiful that it must be generally known. The lady is not elderly, by the way, according to our ideas. She looks about 30. She is not particularly attractive and the painting of the face is very smooth. But she wears one of the most gorgeous head-dresses ever painted, a miracle of jewelled net, over which is a wimple of gossamer material, simply floating, so that you feel your breath would blow it off the picture. She wears a richly-bro-caded robe of gold and scarlet so realistically done that it is as if the actual material had been glued on to her, and on her hands are rings that light the picture. No print of this, or indeed of any of these portraits, can give any idea of the skill of the artist. Following on these are two walls of Memling, also a genius at textiles, as he was at meticulous detail and decorative landscape; of Hugo van der Goes, and Dieric Bouts. The brilliant colour of this miniature work, picture piled on picture, is in its general effect quite dazzling, and it Is hard to leave the composite effect and settle down to the work of examination inch by inch, which one must do to appreciate the industry, the patience of these men. As my readers who have travelled in Belgium might suppose, a number of the exhibits here have come from the Hospital St. Jean at Bruges. The most striking of the larger ones, however, two triptyches of the macfonna and child with angels, donors and saints, are now owned and lent by the Duke of Devonshire and Mr. Hugh Morrison, M.P. The second gallery, the work of the Franco-Flemish school, gives us a great - many pictures of amazing ornateness. By common consent, the room of the Van Dycks, the Reubens, and the Jacob Jordaens, is the great room of the exhibition. Here, too, one can sit at ease on the lounges in the centre and survey comfortably those glorious pictures of a former aristocracy, and contrast the splendid beings on the walls with the ugly, knock-kneed, flat-footed, neurotic, drably-clothed generation that processes below them. It is true that the people on the walls were selected from beauty and aristocracy, and that the visitors are the indiscriminate flow from a democratic and machine driven age. But no explanation consoles one for the appalling difference between those dead and the living who inspect them thus. Most of these pictures are among the famous things of the world. Not one of them, one notes with jealous satisfaction, has come from America. They nearly all belong to English and Belgian collectors. The Reubens are, apart from the portraits, nearly all from his smaller canvases. I am not a lover of the immense works in the Louvre. Those spiral masses of muscle and flesh leave me cold. But here there are some perfectly lovely smaller things, notably a Diana hunting that I count a treasure indeed. My three visits did not bring me near the two rooms full of drawings and etchings. And I had but a passing glimpse at the fine Meunier statuary, and at the old carved Flemish chest, depicting the battle of Courtrai, and lent by the Warden and Fellows of New College, Oxford. But I have said enough to explain why some of us continue to live in this fog-begrimed gloom, pitting the declining strength of our puny organisms against the nerve-wrack-ing vibrations of a great city. When the great city gives us compensations of this kind we forgive her the assaults upon our ageing bones. It is a considerable Jump from Burlington House to the Leicester Galleries, where there opened yesterday the show of the illustrations in Colonel T. E. Lawrence's great mystery book, “ The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” which, as everyone knows, came out a little while ago in a limited subscription edition of one hundred copies, priced at thirty guineas apiece. Lawrence is the most romantic figure in the British Empire. Legends are collecting fast about this delightful joker, who, with his thumb to his nose (as I see him), and by virtue of a gorgeous sense of humour and an utter indifference to the things for which most men barter their peace of mind, is able to arouse excited interest by everything he now does. But. of course, he is much more than joker. He happens to be a genius and a great person as well. Everybody knows, by the medium of Lowell Thomas' hook, “With Lawrence in Arabia,” something of the power and influence that Lawrence had in Arabia, and something of the work that he did for the British Army. How the shy archaelogist turned himself into a wrecker of trains and a leader of Arab horsemen, an outsider who could ride and endure the desert hardships with the best of them, is now a matter of history. But his career has been no less amazing since he tried to live his own life quietly in England after the war. He cannot help arousing the wildest curiosity. And no wonder. For the feat in connection with his book is as astonishing as his colonelcy without being in the army. When he

had written up his seven years’ record, running into several hundred thousand words, he lost the whole thing, a disaster enough to break the spirit of any man. But he set to work to do it all over again from memory! And the result is the book for which people are now offering five pounds a week for the loan! Not only did Lawrence rewrite the book from memory, but

he superintended the printing, had a different binding for every copy, and got a number of the most significant artists of the day to do illustrations for it, with the result that the masterpiece cost nearer £9O a book than £3O. Jonathon Cape is the lucky publisher who got the right to publish the abridged version, which is to come out on March 10, under the title, “ Revolt in the Desert.” It wyl have 16 illustrations selected from the SO put into the edition de luxe. While all this has been going on Lawrence has tried- to keep out of the limelight. There are many who smile at this assertion, believing the “ mystery man ” is a supremely clever publicity expert. But the fact is that lie has refused absurd offers from the British Government to take big jobs in the army. Having no money, though mysteriously able to commandeer artists and others for his own purposes, he some time back enlisted in the army as a private, and under another name. Recently, he transferred himself into the air force, and at the time of writing is supposed to be in India. No wonder that the exhibition at the Leicester Galleries drew all kinds of people all day long yesterday, and that everywhere one heard people asking questions of the gal-lery-owners about the queer person who, able to attract, without money, wlia* other men are slaving to get millions for, .still prefers to

go off on a non-paying job and associate with common persons, when he might be hob-nobbing with the rich and famous. Strange indeed! However, the exhibition is worth notice on its own account. The most striking feature of it is the collection of pastel portraits of great Arab leaders, by Eric Kennington. I found these rather staggering. Pastel is not considered a first-class medium for a first-rate artist, but these pictures are firstrate. They are alive and penetrating, as Augustus John's oil portraits are. They could stand side by side with them and not be smothered either in vitality or in colour. Besides them, Eric Kennington has some queer Blakish imaginative water-colours, and some sarcastic pen-and-ink sketches depicting Lawrence as a thorn in the side of the military authorities. An Augustus John drawing of Lawrence, one of the many studies he made of him, is one of the best things in the show, which includes, too, his oil portrait of King.Feisal. Paul Nash is represemed by several fine designs, and William Roberts and Blair Hughes-Stanton by some very modern woodcuts. Henry Lamb, he who did the priceless Lytton Straehey that hangs in the Tate, has a portrait and a war scene. The exhibition has been graced in the catalogue by a characteristic preface by Bernard Shaw, who fiercely reserves tlie rights of

his sentences these days, so that one dare not quote him at any length as one wishes one could. But one can say that his words here show how he rejoices in the “ goings on ” of his young countryman, for, of course, Lawrence belongs to that mysterious race that transplantation transports into leadership all over the world. JANE MANDER.