This exhibition is a timewarp: there are paintings in it, like one untitled, semi-figurative, sinuous tangle of viridian curves and bulbs on a pulsing patchwork of yellows and pinks, which could have been made yesterday. Yet this canvas is dated 1946 and its creator was a journeyman of English modernism, which envied and emulated the roaring innovations taking place on the continent. What makes Stanley William Hayter – who’s better known as a printmaker, and whose reputation has been undeservedly in eclipse in recent decades – seem far more up-to-date than his fogeyish name implies, is that he was, modishly for today, a synthesiser of modernist voices.
A 1948 painting, split into three colour-coded sections whose simplicity recalls late Matisse, alloys Miró-like biomorphic globules to fast, confidently febrile figure sketches that suggest a housebroken Picasso. Hayter isn’t as good as any of them and doesn’t even attempt to outrun them, though his gift for weird, eye-fooling spatiality feels like his own: but if each of his forebears is one voice, he’s a pleasing polyphony of echoes.
Elsewhere there’s energetic and faintly troubling oddness, such as a loopy nude – something like a gymnast mermaid with grapefruit breasts – impaled on a tricoloured beam. Mostly, though, expect deep nostalgia, the easy-breathing pleasure of seeing modernism refined rather than rewritten, and amusement at the fact that Hayter and most recent fine art graduates are effectively playing the same mix-and-match game.