Studio: international art (90.1925)

BELFAST—BERLIN

BELFAST,'—For some reason, perhaps
obvious, art and Belfast do not go
together. Art and Dublin have been
married these many years, and it may
not be long before a marriage with the
fickle nymph is arranged in the
northern capital. There are portents.
Belfast has a good group of local players,
at least one poet, a wood-engraver, and
in near-by Randalstown, the workers in a
linen mill produced a locally written play
of distinction with distinction. Belfast has
also produced a painter. This event is of
twofold importance. In the first place
William Conor is a painter of genius, and
in the second place he is a painter of
Belfast. There are notes in his work that
suggest almost that he could not have
painted anywhere else, and this despite
the fact that he has looked upon the
French impressionists with affection and
understanding. It is bad manners to
pigeonhole an artist, but if one were
tempted to pigeonhole William Conor one
might say that he was the Manet of
Belfast, particularly the Manet of he bon
Bock. This, however, applies only to
form ; in technique and in colour-sense
he is powerfully and admirably himself.
Few have tried to paint Belfast because
most people would have judged the city

" PAINTER AND MELODEON "
BY WILLIAM CONOR

260

unpaintable. No cities are that, not even
Belfast, though it must be admitted the
subject is a difficult one. Only a gifted
artist who loved the town for its own sake
and loved its folk, for it is one of those
towns which has a genuine folk of its own,
could have revealed its paintableness,
could have transmuted its superficial
hardness, its lurking barbarisms into
beauty. But William Conor is no romantic
spell-binder. He paints what he sees as
evidently as any of the older impression-
ists ; but he also sees what he paints. He
is an impressionist in genre and he under-
stands the difficult art of putting character,
in the human sense, into a picture without
being literary. This in itself is an achieve-
ment. His Belfast types and characters
live as designs, as arrangements in colour,
as creations of inevitable and significant
form, and they remain human. There is
no prettyfying, on the contrary what is
repulsive in the curiously elemental folk
of this crude and often primitive city,
primitive nearly always in its passions,
remains. His men from the shipyards look
like apaches ; his women at first glance
remind the mere Englishman as often as
not of Nancy in " Oliver Twist." But
each is redeemed by a flash of humour, a
hint of tragedy and through all there is an
irresistible and undefinable charm of
strong vitality, animal, yet human, with
the peculiar beauty that goes with such
things. If a modern manufacturing town
could have folk-songs and if those folk-
songs could be translated into pictures, or
if the feelings which inspired them could
be pictorially represented, they would take
the form of the art of William Conor.

Holbrook Jackson.

BERLIN.—We give on the opposite
page a reproduction of one of Herr A.
Hoffman's bronzes, which has been highly
praised by connoisseurs in Germany, and
has been shown at many exhibitions. 0
Robert E. Stubner, whose painting from
the Russian Ballet is reproduced here-
with, was born in Forst, a centre of
drapery manufacture in Northern Ger-
many. As a pupil at the Berlin Academy
under Anton von Werner he obtained the
thorough training in draughtsmanship