Poor Blighters

He thinks Picasso overrated, and British art underrated. Says British Painter-Critic Michael Ayrton: "If we in England have one virtue carried to excess, it is our deplorable modesty and sense of inferiority when discussing our own visual arts." As art critic for the weekly Spectator and other British publications, he has waged a hot one-man campaign to boost British art, and denounced Picasso, as "the archangel Lucifer of painting."

Ayrton also took up the brush himself to try to prove his point. At 19, he was earning good commissions in commercial art and stage design. At 21, he had his first show of paintings and a reputation as a prodigy.

Last week in London, Ayrton, now 30, closed the most successful show of his career: drawings and paintings in somber greys, yellows, and greens of hollow-eyed men, women & children with thin, bony figures and a quality of patient loneliness. "My fundamental interest is human beings," he explains. "The most important moments in life are those which occur when two people feel so intensely related to one another that there is nothing to say. Words being absent, appearance is everything."

Ayrton's best work concerns "the greatest human tragedy, the failure to communicate." In Mirror Image, a young man stares at a silent girl whose unhappy face is reflected in a mirror over his shoulder.

In The Mute, a sad-eyed man holds out his hands in silent frustration. In The Indomitable Bather, Ayrton catches the humor and pathos of a more familiar subject, "a small boy who finds it bloody cold in the water, but his passionate desire to stay there is greater than the physical discomfort. He feels violently about it, but doesn't say anything, just stands there shivering to death, poor little blighter."

Sympathy aside, Ayrton patterns his pictures as rigidly as a tile floor. "There's an abstract under every Ayrton," he says. But his abstractions are well disguised. "I refuse to accept formal equivalents of a triangle for a breast, or two dots for an eye. I have no desire to gouge a hole through a woman's figure. Trouble is I'm so progressive I'm reactionary."

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