Art History Today

Cross- Channel Careers (2)

 

Conversations with Degas

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

Sickert was to have many meetings with Degas, and his articles on the French painter are a goldmine of information, not only about Degas’s methods and the layout of his collection, but also his views on English painting and life.[1] Degas took a playful attitude towards English artists and had even visited the English collector Henry Hill in Brighton. Fully knowledgeable about the Royal Academy, and English painters like Millais and Rothenstein, we are not surprised to learn from Sickert that Degas admired English art in his company at the Universal Exhibition of 1889 in Paris. There both painters carefully inspected the English art on show; they approved of such canvases as Orchardson’s Master Baby (1886) and pictures by Victorian artists such as James Charles; they also stood before Whistler’s Lady Archibald Campbell of which Degas said “She is returning to Watteau’s cellar.” Sickert was also privileged to meet Degas in Dieppe which was to become a haven for both indigenous and foreign painters like Augustus John and Orpen. Sickert’s second meeting with Degas was at Dieppe in the summer of 1885 where Sickert learned the painter was staying with the Halévys next door to Dr Blanche’s chalet on the sea front by the Casino. It was in Jacques Blanche’s studio that Degas drew the pastel known as “Ritratti” (Six Friends) containing Monsieur Cavé, previously Minister of Fine Arts under Louis Phillipe, Ludovic Halévy, the painters Gervex and Jacques Blanche, Sickert and Daniel Halévy. Blanche was a friend of Charles Conder who was part of the Slade crowd. Conder was enthusiastic about modern French art; he befriended Toulouse Lautrec and often painted at Dieppe as well as haunting the cafés where he used absinthe to paint his fans. Dieppe became a centre where English and French painters could meet- and many conversations on art as well as painting took place there. Strolling on the front at Dieppe, Degas imparted valuable artistic advice to Sickert and pointed him in the direction of the landscape painter Boudin who influenced the English plein-air school, Whistler, Conder and of course, arguably the greatest English impressionist of the age- Philip Wilson Steer.

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[1] On Degas’s massive collection and its sale, see the exhibition catalogue to The Private Collection of Edgar Degas (Met, New York, 1997).

Cross-Channel Careers (1)

A Society of Anglo-French Painters.

“I will tell you a secret. There is an independent school of painting in England, and the younger and more forward spirits of the modern French school visit London religiously, and are led by what they see here more than we are by what is done in Paris. “Walter Sickert.

Sickert’s remark cautions us about applying too much significance to the fact that many of the founders of the NEAC studied in Paris. However, it is a fact that there was a long tradition of English and French painters learning from each other. And it must surely be significant that the original of the NEAC was to call themselves the “Society of Anglo-French Painters.” Yet, whilist it might be overstretching things to regard this cultural interaction as the equivalent of an artistic entente cordiale, a lot of Frenchmen were Anglophiles. Delacroix had visited England and favoured an elegant type of dress typical of English dandies like Beau Brummel. Also, Delacroix was on good terms with English artists like Bonington; and his art, especially his watercolours, owed much to the English master and others such as Copley-Fielding. Sickert himself was part of this Anglo-French tradition though his cultural origins were more complex as the son of a Danish painter who had lived and studied in Paris. Sickert was the NEAC member most conversant with the French avant-garde as he was on good terms with Monet, Pissarro, Gauguin, Signac, Bonnard and Vuillard. But it was mainly Sickert’s relationship with Edgar Degas ( above) that was the most significant friendship because Degas would act as a catalyst for Sickert’s realism when he came to depict London. Fortunately, Sickert was well prepared for Degas’s training because his father had studied with Couture (who taught Manet) in Paris, so Sickert considered him “more an Antique Parisian than a Dane.”[1] Sickert Senior had also studied with Scholderer who is depicted in Fantin-Latour’s Aetelier aux Batignolles (1870) mistakenly said by Sickert to have been painted by Manet who is shown seated in it. According to Sickert, in 1883 Whistler asked him to take charge of the “Whistler’s Mother” picture which had been exhibited at the Salon that year; so Sickert crossed from London to Dieppe and then went on to Paris. Whistler had given Sickert letters of introduction to Manet and Degas, and copies of his etchings to present to them, to be delivered with the message that Whistler was “amazing.” Alighting at the Hotel du Quai Voltaire, Sickert found himself the guest of Oscar Wilde who was curtly dismissed by Degas as looking like someone “playing Lord Byron in a suburban theatre.” This was to be Sickert’s first meeting with Degas who in mock-jovial manner greeted the former with the words: “Here is the Englishman who is going to buy all my pictures.”

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[1] Most of Sickert’s knowledge about Degas can be found in the tribute he wrote in the Burlington Magazine upon the Frenchman’s death in 1917. Sickert, “Degas”, CW, 413-421.

Antic Hay

Between researching and writing lectures there’s time for the occasional novel. Just finished Aldous Huxley’s 1923 novel Antic Hay; it’s just like I never looked up from my work. Lots of references to artists on this course as well as the more older masters. Most of the characters’ motivation and  personalities are revealed through the art they own or have knowledge of.

Lypiatt the artist- His own art which sounds like a cross between Pre-Raphaelite art and Cinzano. Sounds like he's painting a Futurist portrait of the socialite Myra Viveash. Lypiatt thought to be based on B.R. Haydon. Quotes Michelangelo's sonnets. Huxley wrote an intro to the 1926 edition of BRH's Autobiography.

Coleman the rake- Leonardo's "Anatomy of Love" (Huxley's name for reproductive drawing). I think he means this.

Shearwater the scientist- Doesn't seem interested in art at all!

Rosie (Shearwater)- prints of Raphael's "Transfiguration" and Domenichino's "Last Communion of St Jerome."

Emily - NK. Meets TG in the National Gallery.

Myra Viveash- Has a portrait of herself painted by Jacques Emile Blanche.

Theodore Gumbril the ex-schoolmaster- Piero della Francesca's "Resurrection". Hates Marchand, the landscape painter. Huxley wrote an essay on Piero’s painting at Sanselprocro.

Gumbril Senior- the architect. Pines for Sir Christopher Wren’s vision of a Micheangelo-esque London

Mercaptor the critic- Marie Laurencin, fans by Charles Conder, Victorian objet d' arts, Chines figurines.

Good article on the novel.

Facing English Society: Slides

Slide link for this week.

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Adventures in Modern Portraiture.

“The contrast between Dicksee’s The Lady Inverclyde exhibited at the Royal Academy that year and Matisse’s Femme aux Yeux Verts at the Grafton Galleries was too great for most of the general public; the two paintings seemed scarcely the product of the same century let alone the same decade.” Frances Spalding.

The gap between Dicksee’s Edwardian elegant though decorative portrait and Matisse’s expressively, coloured, spatially incongruous picture could hardly be greater. And it was not only the public who were critical of this bold experimentation in portraiture but also contemporary painters themselves. Augustus John confessed his bafflement at Matisse’s portrait of Mme Matisse, and called it “vulgar and spurious.” Yet even contemporary painters who were in tune with avant-garde tendencies were inclined to harbour reservations about the Matisses on show at the Grafton Gallery. Sickert thought the Matisse “nonsense” and even Roger Fry who had organized the Matisse exhibition had to persuade the public that though the figure might seem ridiculous on the surface, delving beneath, one could see that the linear design was good and the colour harmonies splendid and intense. As Spalding says, the Dicksee takes us back to “past traditions of portraiture” and the social milieu from which they emerged; whilist the Matisse is purely about the picture itself, and that is a fundamental difference between historical social portraits and the way the avant-garde saw the genre. Fry was trying to justify the Matisse portrait in terms of its own forms and colour, not its place in reality. This kind of “formalist” approach would encroach upon English painting with the help of movements like Cubism and Vorticism. The inventor of Vorticism, the avant-garde artist Percy Wyndham Lewis painted a modernist portrait of the eccentric poetess Edith Sitwell (above) which is an important avant-garde treatment of the English portrait. According to William Rothenstein, Lewis said of this portrait “I go primarily for the pattern of the structure of the head and insinuate, rather than stress, the “psyche”” This clinical, detached, above all cerebral interpretation of the Sitwell milieu is not that of a participant of the charmed circle, but an intellectually detached observer with an ironic viewpoint.

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Portrait of a Poet.

“Before me floats an image, man or shade,

Shade more than man, more image than a shade.”

W. B. Yeats, Byzantium.

The period surveyed on this course is a golden age for Anglo-American, English and Irish poetry with such modernist giants as W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and the Sitwells who were painted by many of the artists of the time. Just to concentrate on the portrait of one stellar celebrity- the Irish poet W.B. Yeats who was known to Augustus John and the Bloomsbury Group. Yeats, the most famous poet of the so-called “Celtic Twilight” was painted by John who journeyed to Coole Park, home of Yeats’s patroness, Lady Gregory. In his memoirs John describes Yeats with his “lank air”, “myopic eyes”, and “hieratic gestures” as “every inch a poet of the twilight.”[1] John was engaged to do drawings and an oil of Yeats; the oil was to serve as model for an etching for a frontispiece of Yeats’s collected poems, which Yeats had originally wanted another artist (Shannon) to execute. So John was brought in as a substitute resulting in the oil, a romantic , “Gauguin-esque” study capturing the dreamy abstraction of the poet, though Yeats thought John’s etching made him look like an “English Bohemian.”[2] Eventually though, Yeats came to admire John more; and the Irishman much preferred the Welshman’s art to the American purveyor of high class celebrity and gloss, John Singer Sargent who painted and drew Yeats several times. The portrait above is from the same time.

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[1] Augustus John, Chiaroscuro, 87.

[2] Holroyd, Augustus John, 244.

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Reflecting on the Portrait.

One way of making a portrait seem introspective is to introduce a mirror into it. This mirror-portrait can usually be split into two classes: a portrait of somebody who is situated next to a mirror; or a self-portrait with an actual or implied mirror. Two examples of the first class are Edward Burne-Jones’s portrait of his daughter Margaret and Ambrose McEvoy’s The Ear Ring of 1912 (above). Examples of the second include Mark Gertler’s Self-Portrait, and many of William Orpen’s self-portraits which play with doubling and distortion. And the mirror in the self-portrait immediately puts one in mind of the artist’s studio because it is a prop used during the act of painting the self. In his essay on self-portraits and the studio, Giles Waterfield uses the phrase- “self-framing” since as Waterfield says , such mirroring apparatuses gave the artist the opportunity to show reflections that reflect the artist’s reflections on himself, (The Artist’s Studio, 13). This sub-genre can be traced back to Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait of 1524, painted just after he arrived in Rome. In this virtuosic and somewhat arrogant demonstration of painting, Parmigianino shows himself reflected in a convex mirror. Richard Brilliant has called this image a “tour-de force of contradictory illusion, self-deception, and abortive alienation”, (Portraiture, 157). And he goes on to say that in this instance the spectator is made to feel that in looking at the mirror image he is intruding into the apparently reciprocal relation between the artist and the mirror; the large hand might act as barrier between the viewer and studio space. A more famous example of the renaissance mirror occurs in Jan Van Eyck’s celebrated Arnolfini Portrait in which the artist may be shown deep in the mirror witnessing the wedding of the Arnolfini couple in the room. This mirror may have been the inspiration for another self-framing image: Mark Gertler’s Still Life with Self-Portrait of 1918. Here, the Bloomsbury Group artist shows himself painting in a mirror; the still-life he is representing stands below the mirror, and Gertler shows his studio reflected again in the bottle in the inanimate group. A curious feature here is the looming Japanese figure, which may not only betray Gertler’s interest in Oriental art but suggest his impending doom- he gassed himself in his London studio in 1939 after having attempted suicide on a previous occasion.

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Private & Public Portraits.

“The test of a portrait is not wether it attracts attention on the walls of an exhibition, but how far it succeeds, in the house where it is meant to live, in telling the story of sympathy and comprehension through years of silent appeal.” Walter Sickert, review of R.A. exhibition, The Speaker, May, 1897.

A good point of departure for considering the state of portraiture in late nineteenth century Britain is Walter Sickert’s review of the R.A. in 1897. In this piece Sickert divides portraiture into portraits of an august nature, such as Reid’s likeness of Professor Mitchell which has a “fine old air of serious, self-respecting portraiture” and the portrait destined for the home or the private space. The former would be an example of the open, “thumping advertisement” compared to the more muted style of Roche, or even Sickert’s own portraits like the Mamma mia Poveretta, an uncompromising study of age and bodily dissolution, done a few years later in Venice. Sickert’s uncompromising portrait was designed for the private interior where this cross between Rembrandt and Degas could be studied from the owner’s armchair. A later double portrait of Sickert, Ennui, (above) owes much to Degas’s painted inhabited interiors where the division between the sexes, family members is emphasised. Sickert was to write a fulsome tribute to Degas when the artist died in 1917. Less tense, and more intimate are the portraits of Gwen John’s that she did during her early years in France; these are essentially reflective, capturing quietly the life of the interior during her time in France where she painted companions like Dorelia, who is sometimes shown in pictures with such titles as The Student thus underlining the introspective nature of the picture.

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Social Life, Class & the Portrait.

It seems axiomatic that the genre of the portrait should serve as a vehicle for communicating certain ideas about the social structure, its classes, and the various professions in a specific historical period. For example John Singer Sargent only admitted to the fashionable glitz of the rich and wealthy; William Strang represented the habits of the bohemian and the bourgeois; and Mark Gertler hinted at his own lower-class Jewish origins, though he was to rise into the empyrean heights of the aesthetic upper-middle class at Garsington. Class is certainly important when considering portraits, but as with most theories or generalisations, the hypothesis soon crumbles. The range of likenesses of famous men and women done by outstanding portraitists like Augustus John, Orpen, Rothenstein and Gertler might seem to offer a kind of collective social portrait of captains of industry, heroes of the battlefield, grande dames, poets and writers from all strata, but society is never static; these artists lived at a time when political, economic and military authority was under scrutiny due to the growing liberalisation of society after the puritanical Victorian period. Moreover, each artist had their own attitude towards portrait-painting and there were also psychological angles to consider. An artist like Augustus John would inject something of his own personality into his portraits of sitters, thus it would be more accurate to say that society- as conveyed via the portrait- was seen through the temperament of the artist whatever their social origins, or the class they elected to represent. John’s biographer Michael Holroyd goes further and suggests that John showed his own personality obliquely through the portraits of other subjects. So, according to this theory, John’s portraits were a "gallery" of selves projected onto other people. Thus John manufactured a variety of identities rather than the image of a single integrated human being, and he never believed that his fellow painters like Orpen and Rothenstein had captured the true essence of his being in their own portraits of him. John’s projected self might be contrasted with Orpen who was obsessed with his self-image; but note that it is always Orpen’s own undifferentiated personality that is shown to the spectator, even down to the same pose which seldom varies throughout his self-portraits. Orpen might disguise himself as Chardin, but we are in no doubt that it is his own, aggressive persona that is offered to the viewer. To complicate matters further, some painters gradually introduced satire into their portraits, such as stressing the red face of an industrialist, or the general over-burdened with medals, thus reflecting a muted anxiety about the place of these individuals at the top of society. For example, William Orpen chose to portray T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) not in the heroic way like Augustus John did, but with a shiftiness which ill-becomes such an iconic figure. What could have been the reason for treating Lawrence in this manner? Did Orpen discern something that had passed other painters by? It is interesting that Lawrence’s friend, the poet Robert Graves said that Orpen’s portrait (above) had more of a street-urchin's furtiveness about it than John’s more respectable likeness.[1]

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[1] Goodbye to All That.

“I show you sorrow…”

I really like how Huxley shapes this generalisation about Goya by using a saying of the Buddha, augmented with a quote from Shakespeare, crowned with a wonderful departing observation. Should we be surprised that a man versed in history, philosophy and mystical religion, but with an sensitivity towards visual art, should unite them all in this kind of paragraph, a sort of highlight, scintillating passage in his whole essay on Goya written in 1950.

'"I show you sorrow," said the Buddha, "and the ending of sorrow"- the sorrow of the phenomenal world in which man, "like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep," and the ending of sorrow in the beatific vision, the unitive contemplation of transcendental reality. Apart from the fact that he is a great, and one might say, uniquely original artist. Goya is significant  as being, in his Later Works, the almost perfect type of the man who knows only sorrow and not the ending of sorrow."

 

“Aun Auprendo” means “I’m still learning.”