Blossoming Career

"In the 19th Century it was French painters who created painting, in the beginning of the 20th Century it was Spanish painters who created painting and now towards the middle of the 20th Century it is an Englishman who is creating the important painting of his time."

The late Gertrude Stein was talking (in 1939) about a dapper British baronet who also happened to be an artist and close friend of hers: Sir Francis Cyril Rose. Coming from the shrewd old observer who had "discovered" Picasso, Stein's praise was a big boost for Rose's last London exhibition ten years ago; but not even Stein could then make Rose's work smell sweet to British critics. Last week things were different: Rose's new show at London's plush little Gimpel Fils Gallery had blossomed into a triumph.

Christ & Picasso. The show centered on nine paintings of the Crucifixion, done in oils on thin paper. Rose had long been regarded as a decorative, eclectic artist with a low emotional octane rating: overnight his new pictures established him as a force in British painting. Said London's Art News & Review: "This remarkable series of paintings is not romantic or expressionist, as are most Crucifixions, but may rather be described as liturgical, ritualistic, learned and arcane . . . executed with great resource and command of the medium." Describing Rose as "an artist who believes in both Christ and Picasso," the Catholic Herald went out of its way to "quell any suspicion that the painting is strange and difficult because the painter is only partially acquainted with his sublime theme ... Sir Francis is a Catholic whose religion has bitten deep."

Despite the critics' praises, few gallery-goers were likely to see beyond the main quality of Rose's Crucifixion: its ghastliness. Rose had clothed the figure of Christ in writhing ribbons of green flesh outlined with black and lavender, dripping streamer-like gouts of purplish blood. The painting swarmed dizzyingly with abstruse symbols, many of them phallic. Christ's brow, overhanging the foreground, was an electric lamp.

Rose's chalk and ink drawing of the making of the death mask of Christian Berard was far less cluttered and, for all its quiet horror, easier to take. It showed the smiling corpse of the Paris fashion arbiter elaborately bibbed in preparation for the mold maker, who sat, dabbling in a bowl of plaster, by the deathbed (see cut).

Fun & Games. From such macabre work, one might imagine Rose to be a hollow-eyed ascetic; actually he is a gay little blade whose 39 years have been a brilliant whirligig of international fun and games with such friends as Stein, Berard, Cecil Beaton, Louis Bromfield and the Wellington Koos. Rose spent five years studying Chinese art and poetry in China, hurried home to join the R.A.F. in 1939. Married to British Novelist Dorothy Carrington, he now sticks reasonably close to his Chelsea studio.

In perfect seriousness, Rose speaks of creating a "new medium of artistic expression." Half abstract and half symbolic, his new medium requires a highly sophisticated audience, appeals more to the mind than to the eye. He uses light bulbs in his religious paintings, Rose explains, "to represent the eternal light of Jesus Christ by something which people think of when they think of light. I wanted to get away from the historical representation of the Crucifixion to emphasize that it is something still happening."

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