Art History Today

Pictures of a City (4)

Sickert & the Camden Town Murder Series.

“..the sordid nature of his pictures since the Camden Town Murder made it impossible for there to be any friendship between them.” Professor Fred Brown of the Slade to Sickert.

For most people Walter Sickert’s name is likely to conjure up grotesquely looking nudes splayed across beds in crepuscular bedrooms in rachitic, rundown houses, either alone or in the company of some male watcher. These have been erroneously connected with the infamous Jack the Ripper when the “Camden Town Murder” series was actually suggested by the brutal killing of a prostitute Emily Dimmock in Camden Town in September 1907. These pictures which affronted many people and led to some artists breaking their friendship with Sickert like Fred Brown are usually considered the epitome of his anti-idealist creed which preached “gross material facts” as opposed to the elegance and meretricious glitter of painters like John Singer Sargent. Surprisingly, Sickert drew on his quiet Venetian conversation pieces made during 1903-4, but he increased the psychological tension by placing a naked female figure next to a male, clothed one. However, as one critic observes, the generalisation of the theme makes it difficult to see these pictures as illustrated murder narratives about serial killers and their victims. The so-called Camden Town Murder (Yale) was also known as “What are We Going to do for the Rent?” an indifference to naming which might indicate that “Sickert believes in the integrity of the visual character of his paintings so strongly that titles become irrelevant.”[1] Attempts to pigeonhole these paintings into art history classifications fail miserably too. Should these puzzling pictures be regarded as genre, examples of the nude, visual eavesdropping on the relationship between the painter and his model in the studio? Perhaps as Harrison suggests, that despite the “technology of painting” which these aggressively demonstrate with their opaque brushstroke and other devices, they assert that art should be generated from the everyday people and situations in the metropolis.

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[1] Corbett, Walter Sickert, 37.

Pictures of a City (3)

Turning Absinthe Into Beer: From Café Concert to Music Hall.

“He translates absinthe into beer.” Charles Marriot on Sickert.[1]

As we learnt last week, Walter Sickert was born in Munich of Danish parentage, and he enjoyed the company of many of the burgeoning international avant-garde. He was also restless, moving between London, Dieppe and Venice. But it is London that he is conspicuously identified with because of his obsession with uncompromising scenes of urban life which were considered both innovative and shocking. After travelling on the continent Sickert returned to London in 1905 and took lodgings in Mornington Crescent, Camden Town. At that time this area of London was mainly working-class with habitations built to house servants and tradesmen who were employed by the socially elevated households in regions like Regent’s Park. The seediness and shabbiness of these bed-sitting rooms clearly fascinated Sickert who felt quite “at home” in them. Thus Sickert is on record as saying that he loved London “for its evil racy little faces [and] the whiff of leather and stout from the swing doors of the pubs.”[2] Such “low-life” subject matter, music-halls, pubs, dives, bed and breakfast establishments were to Sickert topics of unceasing interest; he was also fascinated by the people who frequented and lived in these urban spaces. Sickert had already dealt with the English music hall, but he returned to the subject in 1906, forsaking Degas’s fascination with the action on stage, and instead turning his searching artistic gaze on the audience. This resulted in such novel works as Noctes Ambrosianae (above) which have been regarded as examples of Sickert as “the dispassionate observer” (Shone) though as Corbett rightly insists, there is equally a longing to be in the audience as well as occupying a detached position outside it. Marriot’s observation about domesticating French influences should not only be placed in the context of the history of absinthe, particularly the English reaction to it- but should also been seen in terms of the cultural fusion between England and France examined on this course.[3] England was certainly not the country of absinthe as the French poets Verlaine and Rimbaud discovered on a trip to London, where they stayed in Camden in 1872. In response to an order for the “green fairy”, the poets were told “We don’t serve spirits here” much to their astonishment and dismay.[4] Rather what Marriot is implying is that Sickert brought the urban realism of Manet and Degas, two of the earliest painters of absinthe in cafés in Paris. A realist painting like Manet’s The Absinthe Drinker painted in Couture’s studio in 1859 (Couture incidentally taught Sickert’s father) might usefully be compared with Sickert’s scenes of pub life, music hall entertainment, and the trials and tribulations of people living and working in early twentieth-century London.

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[1] Cited in Harrison, English Art and Modernism 1900-1939, 32. Harrison also quotes Virginia Woolf who said Sickert “makes us aware of beauty over the shoulders of the innkeeper…”

[2] Quoted in David Peters Corbett, Walter Sickert, 26.

[3] The story of the demon drink is told in Jad Adams, Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle, (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).

[4] Adams, Hideous Absinthe.

Pictures of a City (2)

Sickert & London.

“Had he remained in France there can be little doubt that he would have gained official recognition far sooner, for the sheer vitality and virtuosity of his brush; as Miss Lillian Browse has pointed out, he would probably have been labelled Ecole de Paris, his name today would be of international repute and his prices accordingly elevated. But we must bless the powerful instinct which brought him back to his own country and his own particular brand of realism, to the great storm-dark city which was also the inspiration of two of his idols, Hogarth and Dickens.” Marjorie Lilly, Sickert: The Painter and his Circle, 1971.

The two individuals mentioned here, Charles Dickens and William Hogarth, offered panoramas of London social life through the novel and the painting and print. Hogarth’s unflinching and satiric prints and paintings of such places as Gin Lane, and Dickens’ unforgettable written descriptions in novels like Bleak House brought the city and its cornucopia of characters to life. It is hardly surprising that both Dickens and Hogarth were much loved by Sickert since he championed the illustrative art of Hogarth who he believed had been shunned by the Royal Academy due to snobbery. As for Dickens, many painters were admirers, especially because of the illustrations of “Phiz” much praised by a young Whistler and later his pupil Sickert who commented on the way the illustrator had shown scenes from Bleak House.[1] Outside graphic works, there were Victorian painters like Abraham Solomon who caught something of the atmosphere of the Dickensian world; but perhaps the painter who most deserves the title “Dickensian” is William Powell Frith. His most famous creation, Derby Day, which was compared to Whistler’s Chelsea Shops in an article called “The Gospel of Impressionism” written by Sickert for the Pall Mall Gazette in 1890. Though appreciative of Frith, Sickert pointed out that Whistler’s Chelsea Shops “would tell the discoverers exactly what London was like at the end of the nineteenth-century.“ However Frith’s Derby Day differs from modern art “because it is panorama.”[2] In a later article on how illustrative art had been pushed aside by aesthetic snobbery, Sickert re-assessed the Frith stating that like a long poem this kind of picture could not be taken in at a glance since the human brain was in favour of the shorter poem.[3] However, like a Dickens novel the picture abounds in portraits of individuals and scenes from urban life; and like Dickens, returning to it again and again will pay dividends for the viewer.

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[1] Sickert, “The Future of Engraving”, Burlington Magazine, 1915, CW, 392. .

[2] Sickert, “The Gospel of Impressionism”, PMG, 1890, CW, 76. Derby Day was bequeathed to the NG in 1859 and then later moved to the tate.

[3] “The Derby Day”, Burlington Magazine, 1922, CW, 453-455.

Pictures of a City (1)

Whistler Paints London.

“There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist until Art had invented them.” Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Living.

There is a long list of foreign artists who came to London with the intention of capturing the urban scene in oil, pen or watercolour. Whistler arrived in 1859 and was immediately drawn to the river Thames as a motif. Part of the fascination was with the bridges and structures which he and other artists turned into objects for aesthetic contemplation. Like a true “painter of modern life”, Whistler sketched and painted the human comedy of prostitutes, sailors, dandies, bourgeois though ultimately his fame as an urban painter rests upon his views of “Old Father Thames” seen through the filter of Japanese prints. Later his colours became more muted and his pictures more atmospheric in tune with the “art for art sake” slogans of intellectual aesthetes and seekers after the expression of transient beauty in one of the greatest cities in the world. Wilde might just have written that fogs and other metropolitan aerial phenomena did not exist until Whistler had painted them.

Cross-Channel Careers Slides

Slides for week 4

“Go back, for God’s sake, Mr Ginner to the Louvre….”

When the Camden Town painter Charles Ginner launched an excoriating attack on Poussin in his "Neo-realist" manifesto of 1914, Sickert leaped to the Frenchman's defence...

"My second quarrel with Mr. Ginner is his inclusion, in the list of merely derivative painters, of Poussin. Go back, for God’s sake, Mr. Ginner, to the Louvre, and look at three passages in Poussin. Look at the painting of the vermilion chariot of Flora. Look at the living baby turning to his dead mother’s breast in the Plagues of Egypt, and look at the curve in the blade of a long sword the tip of which rests on some books in a kind of still life trophy under an apotheosis. Look at these three passages and fiche me the peace with your Cézanne!"

Thanks to Gareth Hawker for this montage of Poussin details.

Ginner’s riposte to Sickert’s objection can also be found on the Camden Town pages of the Tate.

Cross-Channel Careers (6)

From Trilby to Tarr

France has quite a number of novels, stories dealing with painters and their studios, of which the most well-known are the Goncourt Brothers’ Manette Salomon, a story about a model, and Emile Zola’s L’Oeuvre, the tragic tale of the fated painter Claude Lantier. Within this stream are also found novels written by English writers about English artists living and working in Bohemian Paris. Trilby published serially in Harpers in 1894 was by the cartoonist George de Maurier; it sold 200,000 copies in the US alone. It’s eponymous heroine, Trilby O’Ferrall works as a model and is loved by a variety of painters. The novel famously features the character Svengali, a name which has become synonymous with the idea of the seducing, dominating guru. Apart from Svengali and Trilby, the novel also contains two thinly veiled portraits of Whistler and Poynter, one symbolising the indolent bohemian and the other the industrious apprentice. Trilby is steeped in the Paris of the late nineteenth-century; but the artist Tarr, in Wyndham- Lewis’s novel of the same name Tarr (1918) is disdainful of bohemian culture. Dedicated to rejecting humour, a stance he regarded as commensurate with the modern artist, Tarr is ambitious in a typically contemporary way. But perhaps the novel’s most famous character is the German artist Kreisler who with his Nietzschean eruptions and his disgust at his artistic failure has been seen as anticipating the personality of Hitler. Wyndham Lewis was to eventually write an appreciation of Hitler in 1931 which brought his career to a standstill, but it was to undergo something of re-start with a major retrospective in 1949 and the interest of young, engagé critics like John Berger who was his friend and exhibited with the older artist.

Cross-Channel Careers (5)

The Three Gs: Gore, Gilman & Ginner.

Spencer Gore (above) was at the Slade (1894-6), worked in Dieppe between 1904-6, where he became influenced by modern French masters such as Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Gore first met Sickert there in 1904 when the older artist brought Rothenstein (a pupil of Sickert) with him. But far from discoursing on post-impressionism, Sickert seemed more interested in the illustrative tradition of Victorian painting such as music-hall, a subject that Gore also painted but in a radical style. Sadly, Gore succumbed to pneumonia at the age of 36 in 1914 which tragically caught short an immensely promising career; he was commemorated in an exhibition held later that year, fulsomely reviewed by Sickert who admired Gore of all the Camden Town artists.[1] That year of 1914 was not only marked by the start of Great War but also manoeuvrings in the London art world. Two other English post-impressionists, both with the initial G (Gilman and Ginner) moved further away from Sickert and called themselves neo-realists.[2] Ginner was born in Cannes and had lived in Paris for a decade before moving to London and bringing his knowledge of modern art with him. Remaining in England for the rest of his life and retaining his French accent, he came to embody the idea of an Anglo/French modern style. By contrast Gilman did not stay at home but trotted round the globe: he visited Spain, France, Sweden, Norway, the United States, Nova Scotia and other places. After the Slade, Gilman studied in Spain where he copied Velasquez diligently and met his future wife. Gilman’s wanderlust was rewarded with many interesting subjects and settings such as Norwegian fiords. His Canal Bridge owes much to Van Gogh and it was while in France during the early 20^th century that he saw many post-impressionists amongst whom he rated Van Gogh the highest, not only on aesthetic grounds but also for his socialist values.[3] Gilman was also First Secretary of the London Group (added to the Camden Town nucleus which included the Nash brothers, Wadsworth and Nevinson, not to mention the sculptors Epstein and Gill). The London Group’s first exhibition was held at Brighton in 1913, but Sickert could not reconcile himself to the young Turks. As Bertram says, they were too Post-Impressionist for Sickert and much too Post-Impressionist for Tonks, a member of the NEAC, who declared in dismay that most of the London Group had been “raised” by him![4]

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[1] Sickert, “A Perfect Modern”, 1914, CW, 353-356.

[2] Frances Spaulding, British Art since 1900, 48.

[3] According to Ginner, Gilman saw “collections such as Bernheim’s, who possessed a room entirely decorated with the works of Van Gogh, a sight unsurpassed in beauty and intensity; Durand Ruel’s collection of French Impressionists; Pellerin’s Cézannes; also the Vollard and Sagot Galleries with their Rousseaus, Picassos, Vuillards, et

[4] Bertram, A Century of British Painting, 87.

Cross-Channel Careers (4)

Impressionists & Post-Impressionists in England.

In 1905 a group of artists foregathered in Sickert’s rooms in Bloomsbury. This assembly included Spencer Gore, Lucien Pissarro, Augustus John, Henry Lamb, Harold Gilman, Robert Bevan (above), Walter Bayes and Charles Ginner. Most of these artists were influenced by post-impressionism, and in 1910 they would form the Camden Town Group which included Innes, Wyndham Lewis and Manson. However, a few of them remained faithful to the original aesthetics of impressionism. The most obvious link between Impressionism and the Camden Town Group was Lucien Pissarro, son of one of the original impressionists Camille Pissarro; Pissarro fills settled in London in 1893 and was naturalised in 1916. Pissarro père had in fact fled to London- along with Monet- to escape the Franco-Prussian War in 1877 where he had studied Turner’s paintings in the London museums. Linking impressionism in England with last week’s session on the evolution of the portrait, we must also remember the influence of the impressionist brushstroke on portraits, of which the greatest exponent was John Singer Sargent, head of what Sickert contemptuously called “the wriggle-and-chiffon school of portraiture.” Though Sargent scored his greatest successes as a portrait painter, he painted sketches and watercolours of landscapes and cities like Venice. And of course he painted in an impressionist manner Monet at work on a landscape. Sargent’s great rival Augustus John never really took to impressionism; his landscapes of the early twentieth-century such as The Blue Pool are more conservative in style. It is probably the case that John only took from French artistic culture the Bohemian image; but he had little sympathy for the audacious modern art that was attracting enterprising members of the Slade. It is unsurprising that in his memoirs he was reserved about the new developments on the continent; he states that he much preferred Picasso’s Commedia dell’arte drawings (which he was shown by the artist in Paris) and paintings over his “cubistic experiments.”[1]

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[1] Augustus John, Chiaroscuro, 62.

Cross-Channel Careers (3)

Steer & Impressionism.

Steer was an admirer of Burne-Jones, Watts and Millais, but not as much as Turner whose art was a lifelong obsession. Though Steer is often grouped with the “English Impressionists” he took little notice of the original Impressionists while studying in Paris, which as Anthony Bertram suggests is because he had already imbibed their lessons from time spent looking at their art in the Goupil Galleries in London during the late 1880s, when he would have been exposed to artists like Monet, Renoir and Pissarro.[1] And as Charles Harrison says, claims for French influence should be circumspect since Steer returned from his two year stint in Paris “with virtually no understanding of the French language and with little enthusiasm for the Manet retrospective exhibition which he had seen at the end of his stay.”[2] What he did share with his French Impressionist counterparts however was the scorn of the daily press who gleefully sniped at his pictures: the Telegraph called his Bridge “either a deliberate daub or so much midsummer madness” and the Spectator wrote of “artistic perversity” in his art overall. Other considered opinions were voiced by the art critic and friend of Manet and Degas, George Moore who said “Mr Steer takes a foremost place in what is known as the modern movement.” But what was modern about Steer? Harrison has pointed out that Steer’s transition from brightly-hued pictures with speckled brushwork to watercolour and more informal landscapes reflects a shift commensurate with the “mainline of development within the NEAC: a gradual progress from moderate impressionism to moderate conservatism.” And Anthony Bertram draws our attention to the idea of Steer’s art as “wholly without “literature”” which aligns it with the art of aesthetic experiment and the operations of painting rather than symbols used to convey meaning or a history painting that could be read as a narrative. However, as Bertram says, what is quintessentially English about Steer is the presence of the English weather; “weather is an invisible abstraction, and Steer makes us see it.” This of course owes much to Turner.

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[1] Bertram, A Century of British Painting 1851-1951, 70.

[2] Charles Harrison, English Art and Modernism 1900-1939, (Yale, 1981), 20.