Page 49 - Studio International - March 1965

London Commentary

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with often droll effect. People will recall the shock
when one of Epstein's monumental carvings was taken
to a Blackpool side-show; now the side-show be­
comes a part of the Bond Street art scene-elaborate,
humorous. satiric comment on certain aspects of our
life, the more striking because the materials are mass­
produced for function but here adapted with ingenious
if sometimes morbid invention.
Paul Dufau, a 67 year old shepherd from south-west
France. held his first exhibition ever at the Grosvenor
Gallery. Self-taught. he was discovered by Fleur
Cowles, the American writer, when she visited his farm
in 1963. But she found not a naif, a primitive, but a man
who had studied the work of Braque, Klee, Picasso,
Dubuffet and others in a private collection near his
home. His art. he told me in a conversation, was de­
voted to the celebration of the essence of things and,
looking at these small paintings in which he has used
varied techniques, one feels the attempt not to recreate

nature but to create in colour, texture and proportion
a man-made artifact that will work in harmony with
the natural world and also with other art forms. This
attempt in its modest sincerity succeeds.
Showing at the O'Hana Gallery, Ivor Weiss. London­
born artist who has exhibited and worked here and in
the U.S.A. bends his forms of objects and people into
the liquescent contours of melting candles, an
imagery that recalls Soutine. But the artist is too much
his own master to be more than merely similar to
Soutine for his colour scheme is individual and there
is a plastic certainty in each canvas that conveys his
own impressive identity.
Post-Impressionists Bonnard, Vuillard and Sickert
have long enjoyed in this country a respect among
artists who never fight for a place on the band-wagon
but are content to follow a tradition of reflecting life
in family interiors and familiar streets. Bernard Dunstan
is the English intimiste without peer and in his small
panels at the Roland, Browse and Delbanco Gallery
we are in the presence of glowing tonal poems the
Nabis would have warmed to.
Another admirer of Vuillard is the Scottish painter
Charles McCall whose one-man exhibition opens at
the F.B.A. Galleries on 30th March. In small dimensions
he can extract from a daily scene such as a woman
dressing or a Kensington back street arrangements in
colour and tone that are almost freely abstract in the
sense that the brush creates its own metaphors without
mirroring reality. ■
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