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WILLIAM GAUNT TALKS
OF ARTISTS S
.THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE who have never seen an oil
i fing except by accident-and many more who go out of
eir way to see one-have read what William Gaunt has
aren bout oil painters. "The March of the Moderns" is a
eie ibook by Mr. Gaunt. It is scarcely out and people are
ock 0 ng .fo buy it.
i.. the secret of this
-HAT a ,on ba c L 1. LL11
popular success in a field
nly thought to be reserved
r ,hoighbrows"?
The? answer is simple. William
has made it his business to
ante about artists as human be
ins rather than about art in ab
tsterms unintelligible to the
secn. He was doing quite well
Stheven before the war. By
time the war ended, a vast
Spublic for art had been
eted in Great Britain partly
through the National Gallery ex
ibitions of war artists.
SArt became news. The queues
for big post-war exhibitions in
London, particularly for a Van
Gogh exhibition at the Tate Gal
lry, were the biggest ever seen
i Britain away from a football
led -adietu. William Gaunt became
avy he art critic of the "Evening
il, Standard," and irt a short while
n his down-to-earth but well-in
w formed comments were among
he most popular features in Lord
SDi eaverbrook's middle-class after
M noon paper.
!'The March of the Moderns" is
even better than his previous
Sooks, perhaps, because of his
p C spll in Fleet St. What he did 'so
)ecial well for Rosetti, Millais and - the
rope other "wild boys" of Victorian
'jib England in "The Pre-Raphaelite
Tragedy" he has now done im
peccably for the moderns.
It is a story more fascinating
:han any novel, and is told with
IGOR STRAVINSKY -From a drawing by Pablo Picasso. Help
IGOR STRAVINSKY
-From a drawing by Pablo Picasso.
a complete absence of the liter
ary jargon of the professional
art critic.
No talk here of "planes of
colour," "significant form," or the
other stereotyped phrases-just
the full flavour, whether humor
ous or tragic, of the lives and
work of artists whose names
have become, and still are, talk
ing points for the great public,
J1 TALES OF DISTINCTION
SELECTED STORIES.-By Mal
achi Whitaker. (Jonathan
.Se Cape).
T HIS is a collection of a great
th variety of author's short
stories. They are full of unex
pected and intimate description.
) with a subtle and gentle irony.
James Agate has compared Mal
achi Whitaker to Maupassant and
he must he thinking of her use of
irony, Both have depicted the
irony of man's' inhumanity to
man; but the Frenchman's irony
is stark, merciless and disturb
ing, whereas Malachi Whitaker's
is more gentle and suggested than
fithlessly presented and not quite
so regrettable.
.Mct of the characters are un-
iophisticated people, sometimes
naive, sometimes rustic. In the
short story, "New Moon" a more
arban, if not altogether sophis
iry ticated type of woman is intro
t duced. The theme is more in
Isist solved and the irony crueller.
be rs. Mollincaux, a widow of some
:ty, manths, had begun to hate:her
sera husband soon after her marriage,.
when she was very young. Her
three sons had inherited their
father's characteristics so that
Mrs. Mollineaux could not resist
some of the same feeling of hat
red towards them.: For forty
years she had pretended to fill the
role of wife and mother and it is
not until her husband and three
sons have died that she feels free.
She destroys all vestiges of the
past, the photographs of her hus-
band and sons and -the curios they
sent her from the east, and then
'she was no longer the old
woman, but a young girl of
fifteen, untouched by life, just
blooming into a .new and ex
quisite happiness."
There is nothing complicated or
really involved in the plots of
these short stories. They are
simple, yet convincing. There
is nothing sentimental, sensational
or neurotic to mar the authenti
city of the stories.
The collection has been made
with the author's approval and is
a presentation of the best of those
stories, already so well known.
Book Reviews
including the president of Bri
tain's Royal Academy, Sir Alfred
Munnings.
There are three phases to this
story. In the first, Gaunt takes
us to the hill of Provence and
shows us the queer figure of Paul
Cezanne, with his straggly white
beard, his knapsack on his back
and a fierce disposition trudging
to a- solitary spot where he can
add a few daubs of paint to a
landscape, convinced, though no
one else was, that he was "the
greatest living painter." He
shows you Cezanne ripping a
canvas to bits because it didn't
come up to his standards. And
he also shows you the rich con
noisseurs flocking to Cezanne's
home in Aix in tribute to the
master-when he was decently
buried.
In the first part also are the
stories of Gaugin, the adven
turer, who deserted his stock
broking business and his family
to live in and paint the South
Sea islands (as duly recorded by
omerset Maugham and Holly
wood in "The Moon and Six
pence"); and of Vincent van
Gogh, the mad Dutchman with a
mission in life, who died insane
at 37 and left a mass of sun
drenched pictures that are, in
Western Europe at any rate, the
most popular works this century'
has produced.
IN the second part, Gaunt passes
on to the 1914 war and to the
conflict in artistic trends that
matched the greater conflict be
tween the nations, the age of war
painters like C. R. W. Nevinson
and Paul Nash, writerslike D. H.
Lawrence and James Joyce, the
age, also of Freud and his theor
ies of the alleged preponderance
of sex in our favourite neuroses.
Finally, we have the post-war
period, which is still with us,
though another war has inter
c vened.
Gaunt surveys the crazy twen
ties with its Dadaists. its -Futur-
ists (adopted with enthusiasm by
the Fascists in Italy and the
Communists' in Russia-before
they discovered that Futurism
was "bourgeois"), Picasso and
the present-day, surrealists, led
by the successful dollar-earner,
Salvador Dali.
"THE MARCH OF THE MOD
ERNS," by William Gaunt.
SJonatkan Cape.
$