Andrew Lambirth

Forgotten giant

It’s always a pleasure to visit Pallant House. At the moment, it seems particularly good value: three separate exhibitions plus the permanent collection, not forgetting the restaurant and excellent bookshop. William Roberts (1895–1980) is one of those forgotten giants of British Modernism who has been crying out for reassessment, and now here’s the perfect-sized exhibition to showcase him. Meanwhile, Art for the Classroom: School Prints 1946–9 documents an inspired initiative which brought colour lithographs by leading British and European artists into the schoolroom. In the print room on the ground floor of Pallant House is a selection of the best, including memorable images by Matisse and Braque, Picasso and Léger, together with splendid home-grown work by Tunnard, Trevelyan and John Nash, with a handful of lesser-known figures like Gerald Cooper thrown in. The show, which runs until 25 March, is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated paperback by Ruth Artmonsky, priced £12. The third exhibition is dedicated to Bomberg and the Borough Group (until 1 April), and includes some stunning drawings by Bomberg himself, particularly of Petra, St Paul’s and the River Thames. The room of followers features Auerbach along with Dennis Creffield, Leslie Marr, Roy Oxlade and Cliff Holden. A whole seam of postwar British art is thus unearthed and accounted for. Fascinating.

The Roberts show is spaciously hung in three rooms. It begins with a no-nonsense self-portrait in a flat cap from 1931 to set the tone, and continues through a series of his major paintings, ranging from the 1920s to the 1970s. It avoids the earlier Vorticist work, which I’ve always admired, and has no space for drawings, but it does provide a useful introduction to Roberts’s mature achievement. For a much more detailed account of the whole life see the recent monograph by Andrew Gibbon Williams, entitled An English Cubist (Lund Humphries £35), which ably covers all aspects of Roberts’s unorthodox and contentious career.

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