Studio: international art (90.1925)

" BIRDS OF PREY." BY
ISABEL CODRINGTON

Princess Louise as typical of progress which
woman had made. 0000
Indeed, one has only to compare the
work of that great Victorian woman
painter, Lady Butler, with its subservience
of art to drama—one might say melo-
drama—with that of Isabel Codrington,
as it were trying to eliminate all action
or story from her canvases to appreciate
at what a disadvantage the real artist works
in order to achieve recognition not by
the layman but by brother workers in the
pure technique of their craft, which is
after all the only tribute that really counts
in art. This art is modern in the sense
of revealing the latest achievements of
technique without being merely an ex-
pression of modernity ; it is classic in the
sense of being a complete embodiment of
all that is best in the great traditions of its
own craft throughout the ages ; but, above
all, it is dignified with the dignity of
sincerity and purpose—the work of a man
accomplished by a woman—and for this
reason the work of Isabel Codrington will
stand for one of the turning points in the
history of British art. 000

L. G. R. H.

218

MR. HARRY CLARKE'S PICTURES
FOR " FAUST/' * 0 0 0 0

ART and literature, Siamese twins
making their first curtsey to the public
in a script that was a series of pictures, and
persisting together through the centuries
that have filled the world's galleries with
masterpieces, most of which are pictures
for the books, sacred and profane, of all
nations, have never yet been separated.
For even in its uttermost abstraction art
is still a word about life, and literature
never ceases to be pictorial. 0 0
And though to the simplicity of the lay-
man, the man untroubled by questions of
form and technique, the immediate appeal
of literature is pictorial and the immediate
appeal of art almost entirely literary, there
is something beyond this immediate appeal,
and that is to be found, both in its most
primitive and its most advanced form, in
the demand for art and literature in com-
bination, in the demand for picture-books,
A childlike love for the representation,
side by side with the statement that the
ogre bit off the boy's head, of the interesting
operation actually in process is not, even
for the child, all there is in the picture.
Even for him there is something else that
prevails, emerging to capture him before
the horrid details are registered for his
delight and remaining, in proportion to
the quality of the picture long after they
have become matters of indifference. 0
And so, and not otherwise, is it for us
all. And since illustrations good and bad
cannot escape being a measure of personal
feeling about a text, a critical appreciation
of a text—whether it be a drama or a never
so sublimated sense of existence—and
since Mr. Clarke's pictures for " Faust " are
good pictures, the immediate interest of
them lies in his manner of representing the
Faust legend. For the story Goethe wrote
in light across the darkness of the Middle
Ages, and whose climax he reveals in the
neglected second part : " Who would be
free must daily conquer his freedom anew,"
the story that in its truncated form is a
tragedy showing human experience as
inevitable disaster and its solution a hint

* Goethe's "Faust"; trans. byDr.Anster; illus-
trated by Harry Clarke. (George G. Harrap and Co.,
Ltd.)