Diary extracts for March 1948

4th Mar 1948:

To Academy Hall for Modern Painting and Sculpture. Gertler

. . . too many Chiricos. Good Modigliani, Epstein’s Bernard Shaw, wonderful. The first Paul Klee originals I have seen. Poor Picasso’s. Good small Rouault and Chagall.

9th Mar 1948:

Working all day on Excalibur (never ending!) 

Finished on the 11th. [Remembrance of Things Past (1947)]

12th Mar 1948:

Took Harvest Festival and Excalibur along to Mudge at Fawley to be photographed for the press.

RA Illustrated is going to be issued again this year.

Painting again on ‘animals in the snow’.

16th Mar 1948:

Into Southampton.

The hairdresser told me there was a good show of French paintings at Art Gallery so I went there and found the Peto Collection on view.

The colour is all very beautiful and makes the pictures in the Gallery look very muddy. Even Kit Wood’s ‘Woman at Prayer’ looked dull, but I think the toplight has something to do with it.

17th Mar 1948:

Letter from ‘Life-Time’ [Time-Life?] to say that in Churchill’s memoirs they are reproducing in colour my painting in the Tate Gallery of ‘Survivors on Upturned Boat.’ [Survivors from a Torpedoed Ship (1942)]

20th Mar 1948:

David [Mavis' brother] and Doreen’s wedding. Caroline bridesmaid.

21st Mar 1948:

The visit of Rex Nan Kivell

. . . came down to see us in his huge Horch car. (The only one in England.)

21st Mar 1948:

Visit from Rex

. . .  I think he saw what I was getting at in my work, but is a bit puzzled by the added naturalism. Says the critics will be buzzing round! That remains to be seen.

22nd Mar 1948:

Putting glass on ‘Excalibur’ - packed this one, Harvest Festival and ‘Buttercup field’ (15x18) to take them to the Redfern ready for the RA.

. . .  Dorothy Searle thought they were a throwback to Victorianism. Rex still likes them but confesses he wants to giggle! Peter Cochrane a bit quiet and not sure what to make of them.

What I can’t understand is that they say the development is surprising. I am quite unaware of it and can’t see what the difficulty is. They seem to think in the atomic age everyone must do abstract work! But what reasoning there is behind this I don’t know. It seems to me to be a shelter for the incompetent and shallow-minded.

To the Tate to see Paul Nash memorial show

very good, some outstanding work, perhaps the ‘window’pictures.

23rd Mar 1948:

Crispin’s last day at St. Georges

. . . sorry to leave in many ways.

. . . Alternate friendship and quarrels with John Heaton upset him so. Heaton carries on as though nothing had happened and Crispin takes it to heart.

25th Mar 1948:

Started painting on a 20x30 canvas what I shall probably call ‘The Elysian Fields’, funeral procession through fields with haystack with figure recumbent on it.

28th Mar 1948:

. . . Later went to a cocktail party somewhat against my will at the Sanders. The place seemed to be chock-a block with stupid looking young men of 6ft 6”, and overdressed and made-up elderly women.