ANGER IN BRITAIN IN ART CIRCLES

Wanganui Chronicle, 25 February 1948, Page 5

ANGER IN BRITAIN IN ART CIRCLES

WEIRD EXHIBITIONS BY RUSSIAN ARTISTS (N.Z.P.A.—Special—Copyright.) Recd. 6 p.m. London, Feb. 24 An angry controversy is proceeding in British art circles over an exhibition of work of the Russian born surrealist painter, Marc Chagall, at the Tate Gallery. The British Arts Council, which arranged the exhibition, said: “Those to whom Chagall will come as an entirely new revelation will recognise him as a great artist.” Mr. Norman Wilkinson, president of the Royal Institute of Water Colour Painters, said: "One leaves this exhibition with a feeling that here is a pygmy playing the fool.” The only rational portrait in this show is one of the artist’s wife.” Mr. Frank Salisbury, a leading British portrait painter, said: “Chagall’s works are the product of a perverted imagination developed with a view to achieving a position with the mass minded public. If this is truly representative of popular judgment then we are not only an unhealthy minded, but a degenerate people.” To a layman the exhibition is a weird collection of freakish experiments. The public can study a portrait of Chagall with seven fingers on his left hand painting a picture of a ruby-coloured cow with green horns, attended by a woman whose heart has come apart from her body. In the top left-hand corner of this picture is a sketch of the Eiffel Tower and a parachutist, and in another corner a picture of a Russian village floating in the clouds. Another picture shows a woman standing on the roof of a house kicking a red horse which is straddling figures of a bride and bridegroom in their wedding clothes. The horse has hands instead of hooves and clutches a candlestick.