Galleries - May 2013

therefore, the perfect place to see ‘Sutherland and the Romantic Landscape,’ which focuses on the hugely important studies he made ofthe Pembrokeshire landscape and coastline in the 30s and 40s. A long way for most of us to go but absolutely worth the trouble to reassess a painter whose reputation now seems well on the way up again. Going a generation further back, the spaces, so wonderfully refurbished and expanded for the 50th anniversary ofthe Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham in 2012, have re-opened for the summer. This year’s theme, ‘Perspectives in Love’, a crucial if often hopelessly tangled web for Spencer personally, has, as ever, some absolutely cracking loans, the rarely seen Hilda and I at Pond Street and Patricia at Cockmarsh Hill, being for me the stars. In a sense everything Spencer painted was filled with an ecstatic love for the textures and feel of the seen world with, yet again, another whole dimension being added by seeing the works hanging in the village landscape he always loved best. Julian Trevelyan, living by the river in Hammersmith for over 50 years, was very much a Londoner, the core subject matter ofhis art the Thames in all its myriad moods and moments. That doesn’t imply insular – he was, too, immensely cosmopolitan and well travelled. As a new book, ‘Picture Language’ by his son Philip Trevelyan (Lund Humphries) reminds us, he worked in W.G. Hayter’s studio in Paris in the late 20s alongside Picasso et al, participated in London’s Surrealist high jinks and the Mass Observation Movement in the 30s, before finally settling to a post-war London life of teaching and working in his riverside Eden with his second wife, the painter Mary Fedden. Having been involved in his first and second retrospectives in 1985 and 1998 respectively, I am delighted to see this new publication, which is being celebrated with a handsome launch show at the Bohun Gallery , his long-term dealers (themselves celebrating a remarkable 40th birthday). It contains a whole body which should, I feel, finally confirm Trevelyan’s reputation as one of the most interesting and original painter and printmakers ofhis generation, a maverick independent belonging to no group but his own . . . Meanwhile, by sheer coincidence, Mary Fedden, who died only last year aged 97, is being given a big show at Richard Green this month. Her charming, decorative paintings – still-lifes and landscapes for the most part – mix elements drawn from Braque and Matisse to Nicholson and William Scott, among others, to immensely successful and joyfully uncomplicated effect. NU With William Scott, Graham Sutherland, Stanley Spencer, Julian Trevelyan and Mary Fedden all subjects of some excellent exhibitions (and books) this month (see also p14 for an Elisabeth Frink show), May is proving something of a golden time for admirers of that dealers’ wonderful catch-all – ‘Modern British’. In this his centenary year William Scott is everywhere, with the touring show currently at Tate St Ives (to 6 May), moving on to the Hepworth Wakefield later this month before expanding into a full-scale survey show at the Ulster Museum in October – he was brought up at Enniskillen in Northern Ireland – and the launch of a massive, four-volume catalogue raisonné, published by Thames & Hudson, at the Royal Academy the key events through 2013 around which a whole host of others, will also take place. (For details www.williamscott.org.uk) No more nor less than he deserves for, in retrospect, he and Alan Davie will surely emerge as among the key figures of post-war British painting, the only artists able to absorb the powerful French and American artistic influences of their day (they both knew Jackson Pollock, incidentally) and emerge unscathed. Graham Sutherland, from the generation before Scott has, meanwhile, a wonderful show running at Oriel y Parc. The home of the National Museum Wales in Pembrokeshire it is, 11. GALLERIES MAY 13 MODERNBRITISH