Viva Lewes Issue #151 April 2019

Kitchen Still Life, 1948 by William Scott
© Estate of William Scott 2019. Image courtesy of Southampton Art Gallery
In Colour – Sickert to Riley
Exhibition at Charleston
In Colour – Sickert to Riley is the second exhibition
in the new Wolfson Gallery at Charleston.
Curated by the textile designer Cressida
Bell, it runs until the 26th of August. Thirty
one paintings by thirty one twentieth century
British artists, all engaging with colour in their
sometimes very different ways.
While evoking ‘a grey dusty withered evening
in London city’ in Our Mutual Friend,
Dickens conjures up a wonderful phrase –
‘the national dread of colour’. And indeed,
we often seem to have had an ambivalent
attitude to colour. Reviewing the 1910
New English Art Club exhibition, Huntley
Carter identifies and praises a small group of
‘colourists’ within the club’s ranks – Lucien
Pissarro, Harold Gilman, Robert Bevan and
Spencer Gore (the last two also feature in
Cressida Bell’s show). However, he then cautions
that ‘three fourths of the human race
are unaffected by colour, except in a hostile
form. Pure, clean colour arouses in their
honest bosoms an exasperation only equalled
by that called forth by the so-called indecent
forms of art.’
I don’t know whether Cressida Bell would
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