Studio: international art (85.1923)

GERALD BROCKHURST'S PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS

“UNA.” OIL PAINTING BY
GERALD L. BROCKHURST

of what was revolutionary and very much
alive in art several generations ago was,
to-day, a dull and spiritless affair, a a
Mr. Brockhurst's work is to me one of
the most cheering and hopeful signs in the
art of the present. It responds to the needs
of the time. It belongs emphatically to the
twentieth century. It is not a mere echo of
nineteenth-century formulas, but a new
form of expression fashioned to meet the
requirements of the new century, a a
Nearly a quarter of this new century is
now passed, and yet in art, as in all our
other activities, we are still oppressed by
the weight of the intellectual and moral
errors of our predecessors. All the theories
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which sterilise the work of the younger
men—Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Vorti-
cism, and heaven knows what!—belong
entirely to the nineteenth century. They
are only developments of what historians
call the great Romantic movement.
Thoughtful observers — like Pierre
Lasserre, for instance—have enabled us to
see the essential weaknesses of this move-
ment. In painting and in every branch of
pictorial art its calculated spontaneity and
conventional untidiness are mistaken for
inspiration only by our simple-minded
confreres of the daily and weekly Press.
The medium of art is at least one half of
its inspiration. Romanticism sets itself