Art; English literature -- History and criticism; Literature -- History and criticism
No art could be more different from the art of Gertler than that of
Duncan Grant. For him it seems impossible to scrabble a line or wipe his
brush on a bit of paper without giving delight. As the saying goes, he
is all over an artist. Men endowed with this prodigious sensibility,
facility, and sense of beauty are not uncommon in England. In my time
there have been four--Conder, Steer, John, and Duncan Grant. The danger
is, of course, that they will fall into a trick of flicking off bits of
empty prettiness to the huge contentment of a public that cannot bear
artists to develop or be serious. But Duncan Grant shows no bad
symptoms: from his early picture _Lemon Gatherers_ (No. 35) (justly and
almost universally admired for its great beauty and delightful
references to Piero della Francesca) to the little "still life" in the
north corner of the room, there is a vast progression; and beneath these
gay and delicious paintings--so delicious one could fancy them good to
eat--is a struggle with the problems of design and space-composition as
vital as anything here to be found, unless it be in the work of
Marchand. I noticed, by the way, that in _Lemon Gatherers_, a picture on
cardboard, something is going wrong with the colours, and of this I take
rather a serious view as the picture belongs to me. Duncan Grant is the
hope of patriotic amateurs: blessed with adorable gifts and a powerful
intellect, he should, if he has the strength to realize his conceptions
and the courage to disdain popularity, become what we have been awaiting
so long, an English painter in the front rank of European art.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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