Neglected Master

At the age of 50, after he had been painting for some 30 years, demented Pierre Dumont tried to kill his own mother and was committed to an insane asylum in Paris. There, in 1936, he died in poverty, so overshadowed as an artist by his fellow impressionists Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro that the world had already forgotten about him. Last week London's Redfern Gallery threw open its doors to the first showing of Dumont's works outside France, and the long-neglected painter seemed suddenly destined for an amazing revival.

Out of the Back Room. The revival was due to an enterprising New Zealander named Rex de C. Nan Kivell, who runs the Redfern Gallery. In 1938 he had come across a Dumont landscape in the back room of a Paris gallery. It suggested both the influence of Gauguin and a comparable talent. After the war, Nan Kivell set out to find more of Dumont's work; he roamed all over France, picking up paintings from private collections and the homes of Dumont's friends. In ten years, he succeeded in getting together 54 Dumonts for the current show.

The results last week astounded even Dumont Partisan Nan Kivell. By the time the show was three days old, 25 Dumonts had been sold for a total of -L-12,000 ($33,600). Twelve more were reserved by buyers in what turned out to be one of the biggest stampedes for the works of an almost unknown artist London has ever seen. Among the customers: Actors Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Ralph Richardson and Richard Attenborough, Collector Lord Ivor Churchill, and Ohio's Toledo Museum of Art.

Spectacular Fireworks. Dumont's favorite subject was cathedrals, and his favorite cathedral was the magnificent Gothic pile in his home town of Rouen. He painted Rouen Cathedral in all lights, seasons and moods. His cathedrals are done in somber but pleasant colors, applied thickly in the manner of Dumont's more famous fellow sufferer, Vincent Van Gogh (opposite). His scenes of Normandy, Montmartre and Marseille and his still lifes are gayer, more vivacious, and show a love of life again strikingly similar to that evidenced in Van Gogh's brilliantly blobbed canvases. Like Van Gogh, Dumont also feared artistic impotency. He once told a friend: "I am getting stale, and nervous of repeating myself. I ought to discover something new ... To remain static is death."

London's critics found nothing static in Dumont's work. The Daily Telegraph hailed him as "an ill-starred artist of genius." The Daily Mail reported that Dumont's pictures had burst "on artistic London with the blazing suddenness of a spectacular fireworks display," and even the staid Times noted: "He was certainly a strong painter . . . Perhaps the real reason [why he was forgotten] was that in an age of formidable individualism, he never developed a highly personal and clearly distinguishable style."

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