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paintings only proved that Whistler's refinement, pressed one step
further, could become well-mannered vapidity and that the structural
lucidity and hedonism of the School of Paris looked hopelessly fla:bby
and uncomfortable when transplanted onto British soil.
The saddest case was that of Paul Nash, whose subject matter
suggested the revival of an authentic, native nature mysticism, but
whose borrowed Continental vocabulary proved inadequate to express
this British vision. In the same way, Pasmore's "Evening Star," instead
of recreating the ecstatic evening stars of Turner or the all too thinly
represented Palmer, fell victim to a limp, wispy fusion of Whistler and
cubism; and his art only took on an alert complexion in "The Wave,"
where knotty, spiraling whorls rejected such formulae and recalled the
irrational, organic rhythms of Palmer's landscape. And even Ben Nichol–
son, the one British artist who was able to make a positive statement
by blending the attenuated discretions of Whistler with the intellectual
scaffolding of cubism, has lately turned to what may be an even more
original direction by introducing into partially cubist canvases land–
scape fragments whose topographical precision evoked the Girtins, Cot–
mans, and Boningtons displayed in the second gallery.
It was hardly a surprise, then, that the most pungent and distinctive
contemporary British painters on view-Bacon and Sutherland-were
the ones who owed the least to School of Paris values and the ones
whose eccentric, individual art was the very opposite of that compromise
with traditional, impersonal attitudes which produced the sequential
achievements of modern French painting. In Sutherland's case, the very
sources of his art-Blake, Palmer, Gruenewald, the un-French side of
Picasso--not only speak for his fundamental antipathy to the School
of Paris, but provide him as well with an appropriate language in which
to realize his acutely romantic identification with the pulsating, anguished
life of growing thorns and gorses. And if Sutherland's probing into
such organic mysteries is compelling enough to prevent us rightly from
placing him on scales designed for Braque and finding him underweight,
Bacon's unique vision can also convince us in its own, British terms.
For in his peculiar way, Bacon revives that British marriage of precise
fact and intense feeling, only his facts are not the natural facts of
Constable, Turner, and Millais, or the crystal-clear visionary facts of
Blake, but rather the horrific facts of twentieth-century urban experience.
News photos, television screens, traffic collisions are the images which
reverberate through his hallucinatory canvases, and their reality is
seized in emotional, as well as optical, terms. Before these works, one
not only sees spectral portraits, screaming jowls, violent physical as–
saults, one feels horror, pain, threat. In other words, Sutherland and
