Viva Brighton Issue #74 April 2019

ART
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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 agree.
Viva Lewes readers may remember the (very colourful)
cover she did for the February 2019 issue.
In the accompanying interview with Joe Fuller, she
expressed a wish that people would try wearing
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