THIS YEAR’S ACADEMY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 July 1938, Page 10

THIS YEAR’S ACADEMY

OBSERVATIONS ON PRESENT -J FASHIONS.

“Fashion always had and always will have its day, but truth in all things only will last ,and can only have just claims on posterity.” Such, writes Miss Elizabeth Bowen in the “Listener,” is the-text for this year’s Royal Academy, on the catalogue title-page. Constable, who had a right to, said this. Used, however, in this particular context, the statement becomes cryptic. Must we drag truth up? Or does the academy, boldly, stand for fashion? It does, it is true, seem to make up in fashion — a rather peculiar, prinking, cautious fashion, like English dressing—for what it lacks in style. Almost all the more showy pictures have an approved look; they show a manner of vision which it seemed correct. Manner, manner of seeing, has been borrowed from the Dutch masters, the French impressionists, young negroes, punctilious Germans, even from English painters whose work is not seen here. Immense capability—for hardly a single picture ■in the academy is not “well painted” — has been able to put this learnt, unoriginal vision to almost fatally good use; fatal because there is so little naivety left. Only the naive picture, the picture naive in the great sense, gives one the feeling that something new has happened, or that something important, however slightly important, has been added to life. It is saddening, it brings one within reach of insanity, to look at'hundreds of repetitive pictures, pictures palpably painted by formula. It is this brand of educated pretentionusness that does most, to bring the academy into disrepute. While Ap-. ril after April brings its fresh crop of old stuff, of brightly-painted cliches, less should be said about “true” or “the truth.” The English, like all plain people, fall peculiarly easy prey to affectation in forms they do not recognise.