ABSTRACT
Mr. Leland Bell is the kind of artist who is committed to a concept of painting—one might better call it a culture of painting—that requires for its realization a sense of intimacy with, and emulation of, the great tradition, and this was the tradition Andre Derain was seeking to recover in the last decades of his career, when he recoiled against the whole modernist adventure. Like Derain, then, Mr. Bell places his painting at a considerable distance from the fashions of the moment—fashions that have no use for easel painting as he understands it. In the new exhibition of Mr. Bell's work at the Schoelkopf Gallery, the pictures are small; their subjects are mainly figures, portraits, and still life; the color is not vivid; the brushwork is at once studied, sketchy, and impulsive, intent upon depicting certain observed motifs and yet observedly uncertain and anxious in its realization.
