Complete Wood

Good poets, even while alive, rarely escape the honor of a collected edition, but few painters living or dead have been given an exhibition of their complete work. The reason is that a gifted painter's work is usually dispersed among many purchasers, costs a great deal of money, time and tact to reassemble. One of the most remarkable events of the London art season, therefore, was an exhibition which opened fortnight ago at the New Burlington Galleries--852 oil paintings, water colors and drawings, comprising the complete* life work of a young Englishman who died under a train at Salisbury in 1930 while his fame was spreading over Europe.

Christopher Wood belonged to a period in the arts which has been thoroughly berated for its frivolity but for which many an artist nevertheless feels a nostalgic respect. In the U. S. it was characterized by the brave inebrieties of Greenwich Village; in England by the no-less-eccentric brilliance of writers like Ronald Firbank, who always carried a few lumps of coal in his suitcase to remind him where his family got its money. Like Firbank, "Kit" Wood was a well-to-do, social young man who became a legend, but the legend is of a singularly pure artist whom nobody laughed at, everybody liked and Londoners have become sentimental about.

The quality in Christopher Wood's later paintings which during his lifetime of 29 years won the admiration of Augustus John, Diaghilev, Cocteau, Picasso, and which has caused them to be valued by their owners at prices up to $10,000 is a quality found everywhere in English poetry but exceptional in English painting : magic of imagery. Artist Wood sharpened his delicate color sense on Picasso but his line and composition were personal, quaint, candidly visionary. He produced nearly 500 oil paintings in ten years, turned out four a week during his last summer vacation in Brittany. London's definitive exhibition took three years to arrange with the help of Artist Wood's mother, to whom he wrote regularly, describing his work. Private lenders included Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, Lady Cunard, Actor John Gielgud, Writer A. J. Cronin, and D. H. Lawrence's friend, Lady Ottoline Morrell.

* Except for one painting, unobtainable from the Tate Gallery.

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