– –

(continued from p. 11)

own personality, lay many hours of sound, concentrated study of essential draughtsmanship.

Here, then, was a young artist showing promise. To the Press and public of this country his unusual painting formed a fitting counterpart to his self-assertion and eccentricity, to be looked on with an indulgent smile like the pranks of a wilful child. Beyond lay the thought that it did not do any harm and he would grow out of it anyway. At this point the French diplomatic service administered the most pointed moral lesson, of which we have in our righteousness remained oblivious, not only in taking Sam under its wing but in risking a greater gamble in granting him a scholarship than New Zealand does when it lays a quid both ways on its favourite horse.

A year is a brief span in a painter's life and Sam has made the most of if. At the first step inside Lhote's school in Paris Sam's nose reacted unfavourably to its aroma of rigid formality and he decided there was better picking on the walls of the galleries. Sam's voracious appetite to eat up from the world's most concentrated picture collections all that would nourish his talent might have proved permanently damaging to his development. Sam survived.

His recent showing of paintings contained works old and new and proved that the French consular service has a flair for backing the right horse. Sam has returned almost a new man, and a new artist. He has exercised that choice, as every artist does, in selecting those painters of the past who, in their own day, faced like problems and solved them. He has learned immensely from Greco and Goya, while Vlaminck and Soutine have been swallowed whole. From the process of digestion, Sam himself emerges unmistakably. But Sam knows now what, he wants, and in some remarkably fine pictures he gets it. There is still the pressure and drive, but controlled in a way to allow a coherent personal vision to emerge. Gone are the violent juxtapositions of raw colour, whose virtue lay mostly in its effect of energy released without direction. His drawing and his colour have lost nothing of their former exuberance but, especially in some of his street scenes, gain in strength by their control and direction to form part of an integral whole.

And now, strange to say, to all but the most elite this enfant terrible has become accepted and respectable. May he never find out!