The Camden Town Group in Context

Evidently London is not to be left in the lurch with regard to the very newest “movements” in art. The private view took place to-day at the Carfax Gallery of the second exhibition of the Camden Town Group. Here Mr P. Wyndham Lewis shows three exploits in paint, arresting in their doll’s-house-like primitiveness. It is difficult to take quite seriously his “Virgin and Child,” the forms of which might almost have been cut by a child out of cardboard. The Virgin, with a flat, vacant, yet, to be paradoxical, withal kindly expression, is in a queerly geometrised attitude, and the “wonder” of the Child consists chiefly in the disproportionately large eye and the bruised look of the face. This is ultra-primitivism with a vengeance. Mr Lewis certainly does convey a sense of the slouching gait of two of the three figures in “Port de Mer,” but might it not have been achieved without such sacrifices? One can understand a painter roughing in such things for his own instruction, but apart from the bold richness of colour they appear as exhibition pieces hardly more than grotesque. By comparison works by other members of this “forward” group look almost academic in their verisimilitude – or at any rate unsensational. But there are pictures and drawings of genuine worth. I may emphasise the animatingly handled “Mother and Daughter” by Mr Walter Sickert; Mr J. D. Innes’s fine little landscapes, “Arenig” and “The Mountain Stream”; a couple of capital studies of the nude by Mr H. Gilman; several inventive theatre scenes by Mr Spencer Gore, a small version by Mr Henry Lamb of his portrait at the New English, and two or three lucid works by Mr Walter Bayes.