Page 54 - Studio International - September 1969

One of the most agonizing discoveries that GROSVENOR GALLERY will dispel any illusions. 4
Pasha's garden 1967/8
one can make about English painting of the Here is European colour: the colour of Oil on canvas
past three hundred years, right up to the Munch, early Mondrian and early Kandin- 84 x 84 in.
present time, is the fact, only too palpably sky; Northern admittedly, for Dubsky's
confirmed by familiarity, that it has all been Bohemian origins (his parents came to
painted from the same palette and this England from Vienna in 1939 and he was collision and ellision in which the colour
palette needs cleaning. You can explore any born in the same year) preclude any ready becomes blurred in its movement and dense.
exhibition of amateur art in the provinces; assimilation of the translucency and brilliance The Slade gave Dubsky two very positive
wander round the English paintings at the of colour around the Mediterranean or things to absorb and digest: the dignified and
V & A, or the National Gallery; pore over Aegean. His colour is almost invariably eloquent abstract metamorphosis afforded
Blake watercolours, Bacon oils or Gains- opaque or misted even when it is strong: the the human figure by Keith Vaughan, and
borough sketches; study endlessly whatever psychological stress of northern Europe is the committed struggle to treat reality
is proffered by the Tate's chancy hanging apparent in its colour. But Dubsky has spent abstractly proposed by the followers of
system: the same utterly consistent palette is long periods of his life in Rome, and more Bomberg. Dubsky has learned from those pre-
disclosed. There should be nothing wrong in recently in North Africa, and he has gradually cepts enough to relax, recently and explore
this, for after all there is characteristically enriched and cleansed his palette since leaving abstract ideas on his own. With Red painted
French or Italian colour. It is simply that the Slade. In a recent work, Pasha's garden, in 1969, in which colour is in movement
English colour is bleached, muddy or inert; there are signs that he is beginning to use again, -he is- making- the frame- device -an.
above all, turgid : it moves sluggishly. colour spatially, and not just atmospherically, active
active compositional element instead of a
Dubsky is not really an English painter: one for the forms are more static, hanging formally co-ordinating, distancing and calm-
glance at the corporate range of colour dis- becalmed in a motionless void, and less con- ing deploy.
closed in his first one-man show at the cerned with an energetic figuration of BRYAN ROBERTSON