Touch paper for Modernity
Walter Sickert Gallery of the Old Bedford 1894-5. Purchased by the Walker Art Gallery in 1947
Walter Sickert is a painter who somehow falls between the gaps. Born in 1860 in Germany, his life and work spanned across two centuries. To be 40 as one enters a new century is always tricky as an artist. Does one’s art (and one) belong to the old or the new? Sickert’s parents brought him to England when he was eight. Here he fundamentally stayed, becoming a leading light of the Camden Town Group. He had several studios in Camden and began to paint working -class people in either claustrophobic conversation pieces; out having fun at the music hall (the men in dark suits, with worn faces, lit by the spectacle); and prostitution or sex.
His paintings are often ambiguous, including his speciality of a naked woman on a crumpled bed, often iron, legs splayed towards the viewer/voyeur. Decades later, Lucien Freud turned this image to gold in his own oevre. Freud’s 1972 Naked Portrait hangs nearby to drive the point. Evidently, Sickert lit the touch paper.
Walter Sickert La Hollandaise c.1906. Tate Purchased 1983. This sitter’s pose is modest compared with many of the nudes on show.
Other artistic parallels do not do Sickert such pioneering service. Two examples are the large flanking paintings by Degas and Bonnard at the opening to a big room of Sickert’s strong, sexual nudes. The 1885-90 Degas in particular, in pastel, has ravishing colours and textures. A naked woman lies in an unconventional, awkward looking pose (though not the Sickert splay). Patterned colour-hatching in the foreground is beautiful. Nearby her cast-off flat Turkish slippers are rapidly, perfectly indicated, with one white undulant line on one insole, done in a millisecond, that might as well call itself the line of beauty. SIckert had befriended Degas and was influenced by him, but in comparison, his sober toned and themed pictures can seem both violent and clumsy. Critical response was polarised: the French found his nudes very English while English reviewers found them too French.
Walter Sickert’s father was a painter. Not certain of his direction, Walter began as an actor but then enrolled at art college. That didn’t last long, but on coming out he was apprenticed to American artist James McNeill Whistler, of the enigmatic titles and dark palettes. There’s no doubt, which this exhibition of about 150 exhibits (mainly paintings, a lot in heavy original frames that look dusted in cocoa powder) enforces, that the young Sickert was powerfully influenced by the older artist. Whistler painted Sickert’s portrait (on show) and the pair both did paintings of shop fronts. In these, Whistler’s dinge penetrates Sickert’s work until at last, on one particular shop front, he breaks out, brushing vivid light cadmium red or orange rapidly over the ground cover of dirt-brown. The result sings.
Walter Sickert The Red Shop (or The October Sun) c.1888 Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Norfolk Museums Service (Detail shown on frontispiece)
While Sickert’s palette remains almost relentlessly gloomy, here and there the jubilation of colour leaps out, transforming. The shouting colour is often red. One such, among a large series of paintings of the London and occasionally Parisian music halls is Minnie Cunningham at the Old Bedford, from 1892. In the large solo portrait, the singer stands sideways, isolated on stage, her young forearm like a stick, belting out a song in a flaming red dress that near engulfs her. The rest is so relatively sketchy that she becomes practically abstract. All eyes are on her. Perhaps it’s her torch song.
Walter Sickert Minnie Cunningham at the Old Bedford 1892. Tate
And in one of the largest and definitely brightest painting on exhibition, Bathers (1902), it’s almost as if Sickert becomes someone else. Men and women stride into the sea in striped, stretchy bathing costumes. No beach, no sky. Just sea and bathers. Seen from behind, the sea swirls around them; an acre of sea. This wonderful, uncharacteristic picture was commissioned by the Hotel de la Plage (Dieppe) but never hung. Perhaps they wanted elegant figures promenading with parasols, but their loss is our gain.
Walter Sickert Bathers, Dieppe 1902. Purchased by the Walker Art Gallery 1935
Again very large, a star of the show is Ennui [Boredom]. In it a man sits at a huge near empty round wooden table smoking a cigar, staring into middle distance. Behind him at a chest of drawers stands a younger woman finishing her toilet at a mirror scarcely visible behind a dome of stuffed birds.
Walter Richard Sickert Ennui c.1914 Tate Presented by the Contemporary Art Society 1924
On the back of the smoker’s chair is a garment; either a man’s fur-collared coat or a woman’s furred pelisse — one cannot tell. Whatever furry item it may be, he is parked proprietorially on it. What is the boredom of the picture? The caption suggests a marital portrait of two people with nothing to say, but given that the chest of drawers implies a bedroom, the boredom is surely that of the younger woman re-inserting her earring, not looking at her satisfied client having a cigar before leaving.
Sickert is both disturbing and interesting. The music-hall scenes were shuddered at for being too lowbrow, perhaps because unlike those of Degas and also Lautrec before him, the audience isn’t in top hat and evening dress. The nudes and bedroom scenes shocked at the time and retain the power to shock today with an undercurrent of menace and a true representation of the grim repetitiveness of prostitution. That he borrowed from others but clearly also left his own powerful trail puts him into a place of fresh importance. That his painting was sometimes clumsy is interesting in itself. Sickert linked the two centuries he worked in in a unique way and this exhibition shows him to have been a much greater innovator than previously thought.
WALTER SICKERT
TATE BRITAIN
The Linbury Galleries
Millbank, SW1P 4RG
28 April - 18 September 2022
No Images may be taken from this blog or used in any way.