Walter Sickert
Walter Sickert RA RBA | |
---|---|
Born | |
Died | 22 January 1942 Bath, Somerset, England | (aged 81)
Resting place | Church of St Nicholas, Bathampton |
Nationality | British |
Alma mater | University College School King's College School |
Known for | Painting |
Notable work | |
Movement | Post-Impressionism |
Spouses |
|
Walter Richard Sickert
Sickert was a cosmopolitan and an eccentric who often favoured ordinary people and urban scenes as his subjects. His work includes portraits of well-known personalities and images derived from press photographs. He is considered a prominent figure in the transition from Impressionism to Modernism.
Decades after his death, several authors and researchers theorised that Sickert might have been the London-based serial killer Jack the Ripper, but the claim has since largely been dismissed.
Training and early career
Sickert was born in
The young Sickert was sent to
In 1883 he travelled to Paris and met Edgar Degas, whose use of pictorial space and emphasis on drawing would have a powerful effect on Sickert's work.[5] "Degas provided the counterweight to Whistler, and one which was eventually to prove the more significant for Sickert's development."[6] He developed a personal version of Impressionism, favouring sombre colouration. Following Degas' advice, Sickert painted in the studio, working from drawings and memory as an escape from "the tyranny of nature".[5] In 1888 Sickert joined the New English Art Club, a group of French-influenced realist artists. Sickert's first major works, dating from the late 1880s, were portrayals of scenes in London music halls.[7] One of the two paintings he exhibited at the NEAC in April 1888, Katie Lawrence at Gatti's, which portrayed a well known music hall singer of the era, incited controversy "more heated than any other surrounding an English painting in the late 19th century".[8] Sickert's rendering was denounced as ugly and vulgar, and his choice of subject matter was deplored as too tawdry for art, as female performers were popularly viewed as morally akin to prostitutes.[9] The painting announced what would be Sickert's recurring interest in sexually provocative themes.
In the late 1880s he spent much of his time in France, especially in
Sickert's fascination with urban culture accounted for his acquisition of studios in working-class sections of London, first in Cumberland Market in the 1890s, then in Camden Town in 1905.[13] The latter location provided an event that would secure Sickert's prominence in the realist movement in Britain.[14]
On 11 September 1907, Emily Dimmock, a prostitute cheating on her partner, was murdered in her home at Agar Grove (then St Paul's Road), Camden. After sexual intercourse the man had slit her throat open while she was asleep, then left in the morning.
While the painterly handling of the works inspired comparison to Impressionism, and the emotional tone suggested a narrative more akin to genre painting, specifically Degas's Interior,[16] the documentary realism of the Camden Town paintings was without precedent in British art.[17] These and other works were painted in heavy impasto and narrow tonal range. Sickert's best-known work, Ennui (c. 1913), reveals his interest in Victorian narrative genres. The composition, which exists in at least five painted versions and was also made into an etching, depicts a couple in a dingy interior gazing abstractedly into empty space, as though they can no longer communicate with each other.[citation needed]
Just before the
From 1908 to 1912, and again from 1915 to 1918, he was an influential teacher at Westminster School of Art, where David Bomberg, Wendela Boreel, Mary Godwin[19] and John Doman Turner were among his students. He founded a private art school, Rowlandson House, in the Hampstead Road in 1910.[20] It lasted until 1914; for most of that period its co-principal and chief financial supporter was the painter Sylvia Gosse, a former student of Sickert.[21] He also briefly set up an art school in Manchester where his students included Harry Rutherford.[20]
Late period
After the death of his second wife in 1920, Sickert relocated to
In 1926 he suffered an illness, thought to have been a minor stroke.[22] In 1927, he abandoned his first name in favour of his middle name, and thereafter chose to be known as Richard Sickert.[23] His style and subject matter also changed: Sickert stopped drawing, and instead painted from snapshots usually taken by his third wife, Thérèse Lessore, or from news photographs. The photographs were squared up for enlargement and transferred to canvas, with their pencil grids plainly visible in the finished paintings.
Seen by many of his contemporaries as evidence of the artist's decline, Sickert's late works are also his most forward-looking, and prefigure the practices of Chuck Close and Gerhard Richter.[24] Other paintings from Sickert's late period were adapted from illustrations by Victorian artists such as Georgie Bowers and John Gilbert. Sickert, separating these illustrations from their original context and painting them in poster-like colours so that the narrative and spatial intelligibility partly dissolved, called the resulting works his "English Echoes".[25]
Sickert painted an informal portrait of Winston Churchill in about 1927.[26] Churchill's wife Clementine introduced him to Sickert, who had been a friend of her family. The two men got along so well that Churchill, whose hobby was painting, wrote to his wife that "He is really giving me a new lease of life as a painter."[27]
Sickert tutored and mentored students of the East London Group, and exhibited alongside them at The Lefevre Gallery in November 1929.
Sickert made his last etching in 1929.[28]
Sickert was President of the Royal Society of British Artists from 1928 to 1930.[29] He became a Royal Academician (RA) in March 1934 but resigned from the Academy on 9 May 1935 in protest against the president's refusal to support the preservation of Jacob Epstein's sculptural reliefs on the British Medical Association building in the Strand.[30] In the last decade of his life, he depended increasingly on assistants, especially his wife, for the execution of his paintings.[31]
One of Sickert's closest friends and supporters was newspaper baron
Personal life
Sickert married three times: to Ellen Cobden, a daughter of Richard Cobden from 1885 until their divorce in 1899; to Christine Angus from 1911 until her death in 1920; and to the painter Thérèse Lessore from 1926 until his death.[32]
Sickert's sister was
Death
Sickert died in Bath, Somerset in 1942, at the age of 81. He had spent much time in the city in his later years, and many of his paintings depict Bath's varied street scenes. He is buried in the churchyard of the Church of St Nicholas, Bathampton.
Style and subjects
For his earliest paintings, Sickert followed Whistler's practice of rapid, wet-in-wet execution using very fluid paint. He subsequently adopted a more deliberate procedure of painting pictures in multiple stages, and "attached a great deal of importance to what he called the 'cooking' side of painting".[33] He preferred to paint not from nature but from drawings or, after the mid-1920s, from photographs or from popular prints by Victorian illustrators.[34] After transferring the design to canvas by the use of a grid, Sickert made a rapid underpainting using two colours, which was allowed to dry thoroughly before the final colours were applied. He experimented tirelessly with the details of his method, always with the goal, according to his biographer Wendy Baron, of "paint[ing] quickly, in about two sittings, with the maximum economy and minimum of fuss".[35]
Sickert tended to paint his subjects in series.
Sickert often professed his distaste for what he termed the "beastly" character of thickly textured paint.
Nonetheless, Sickert's paintings of the Camden Town Murder series of c. 1906–1909 were painted in heavy impasto and narrow tonal range, as were numerous other obese nudes in the pre-World War I period in which the fleshiness of the figures is connected to the thickness of the paint—a device that was later adapted by Lucian Freud. The influence of these paintings on successive generations of British artists has been noted in the works of Freud, David Bomberg, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Howard Hodgkin, and Leon Kossoff.[39]
In the 1910s and 1920s, the dark, gloomy tones of his early paintings gradually brightened,[36] and Sickert juxtaposed unexpected tones with a new boldness in works such as Brighton Pierrots (1915) and Portrait of Victor Lecourt (1921–24). His several self-portraits usually displayed an element of role-playing consistent with his early career as an actor: Lazarus Breaks his Fast (c. 1927) and The Domestic Bully (c. 1935–38) are examples. Sickert's late works display his preference for thinly scrubbed veils of paint, described by Helen Lessore as "a cool colour rapidly brushed over a warm underpainting (or vice versa) on a coarse canvas and in a restricted range allow[ing] the undercoat to 'grin through'".[40]
Sickert insisted on the importance of subject matter in art, saying that "all the greater draughtsmen tell a story",[30] but treated his subjects in a detached manner. Max Kozloff wrote: "How not to say too much seems to have become a matter of utmost laborious concern for Sickert", as evidenced by his paintings' studied lack of finish and "neurasthenic sobriety" of color.[41] According to the painter Frank Auerbach, "Sickert's detachment became increasingly evident in his uninhibited procedures. He made obvious his frequent reliance on snapshots and press photographs, he copied, used and took over the work of other, dead, artists and made extensive use, also, of the services of his assistants who played a large and increasing part in the production of his work."[42]
Jack the Ripper
Sickert took a keen interest in the crimes of Jack the Ripper and believed he had lodged in a room used by the notorious serial killer. He had been told this by his landlady, who suspected a previous lodger who stayed there in 1881. Sickert did a painting of the room in 1905–1907 and titled it Jack the Ripper's Bedroom (Manchester Art Gallery). It shows a dark, melancholy room with most details obscured.[44] It suggests his morbid interest in the subject. There is good evidence he spent most of 1888, the time of the murders, outside the UK.[45]
Although for over 80 years there was no mention of Sickert being a suspect in the Ripper crimes, in the 1970s authors began to explore the idea that Sickert was Jack the Ripper or his accomplice. Sickert is not considered a serious suspect by most who study the case, and strong evidence shows he was in France at the time of most of the Ripper murders.[46][47][48]
Personal papers
Walter Sickert's personal papers are held at Islington Local History Centre.[49] Additional papers are held at several other archives, particularly the Tate Gallery Archive.[50] The Walker Art Gallery holds the largest collection of his drawings, a total of 348.[51]
Retrospectives
In 2021–2022, a retrospective exhibition Sickert: A Life in Art at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, displayed around 100 of Sickert's paintings and 200 drawings, claiming to be the largest retrospective of the artist's work to have been held in the UK for more than 30 years.[52] The art critic Jonathan Jones noted: "This baffling man who was born in Munich in 1860, emigrated to Britain as a child and became one of our greatest and weirdest artists, emerges in this excellent show as even odder than I thought. In that unsettling way of seeing lies his modernity."[45]
From 28 April to 18 September 2022, Tate Britain staged the first major Sickert retrospective at Tate in over 60 years, featuring over 150 of his works from over 70 public and private collections, and claiming to be the most extensive retrospective in almost 30 years. The exhibition was organised in collaboration with the Petit Palais, Paris, where it is expected to be displayed between late 2022 and 2023.[53] Jonathan Jones observed, "This hellishly brilliant exhibition takes you to a place beyond simple moral or political truth. Whatever Sickert was, he was the only British artist of his time who can be as powerful as Munch, Van Gogh or Otto Dix."[54]
See also
- Elwin Hawthorne – artist, worked for a period as Sickert's assistant
- Florence Pash – artist, ran a private art school with Sickert in the mid-1890s
References
- ^ Baron et al. 1992, p. 33.
- ^ a b "SICKERT, Walter Richard". Benezit Dictionary of Artists. (Subscription or UK public library membership required)
- ^ "British National Archives". Government of the United Kingdom. Retrieved 19 January 2014.
- ^ Baron et al. 1992, p. 34.
- ^ a b c Baron et al. 1992, p. 57.
- ^ Corbett, David Peters, Walter Sickert, p. 13.
- ^ Baron et al. 1992, pp. 35, 57.
- ^ Baron et al. 1992, pp. 15–17.
- ^ Baron et al. 1992, p. 15.
- ^ Biography of Walter Sickert
- ^ Upstone, 2009, pp. 9–11.
- ^ Upstone 2009, p. 47.
- ^ Upstone 2009, p. 39.
- ^ Baron et al. 1992, p. 153.
- ^ a b c d Januszczak, Waldemar. "Walter Sickert - murderous monster or sly self-promoter?" The Times, 4 November 2007. Retrieved 13 September 2008.
- ^ Baron et al. 1992, p. 208.
- ^ Baron et al. 1992, p. 213.
- ^ Baron et al. 1992, p. 156.
- ^ "Mary Godwin 1887–1960". Louise Kosman. Retrieved 8 July 2018.
- ^ a b Baron and Sickert 2006, p. 80.
- ^ Hartley 2013, pp. 189–90.
- ^ Sickert et al. 1981, p. 29.
- ^ Baron et al. 1992, p. 283.
- ^ Schwartz, Sanford. "The Master of the Blur", The New York Review of Books, 11 April 2002, p. 16.
- ^ Sickert et al. 1981, pp. 102–103.
- ^ Sickert et al. 1981, p. 93.
- ^ Soames 1999, pp. 308–309.
- ^ Shone and Curtis 1988, p. 9.
- ^ Lester, Anthony J. "Illustrious Past Members of the RBA". Royal Society of British Artists. Retrieved 15 June 2020.
- ^ a b c d Baron 1980.
- ^ Sickert et al. 1981, pp. 97–98.
- ^ Shone and Curtis 1988, pp. 8–9.
- ^ Shone and Curtis 1988, p. 6.
- ^ Wilcox et al. 1990, p. 10.
- ^ Baron et al. 1992, p. 132.
- ^ a b Shone and Curtis 1988, p. 11.
- ^ Baron et al. 1992, pp. 16–17.
- ISBN 978-0-19-926169-7.
- ^ Baron et al. 1992, p. 6.
- ^ Sickert et al. 1981, p. 22.
- ^ Kozloff, Max (April 1967). "Sickert's Unsentimental Journey". Art News. pp. 51–53, 71–72.
- ^ Sickert et al. 1981, p. 7.
- ^ "The Camden Town Murder", Fisher Fine Arts Library Image Collection. Retrieved 13 September 2008.
- ^ "Manchestergalleries.org". Manchestergalleries.org. 7 July 2006. Retrieved 19 January 2014.
- ^ a b Jones, Jonathan (14 September 2021). "Sickert: A Life in Art review – master of malevolence goes for the jugular". The Guardian. Retrieved 25 November 2021.
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Accessed 18 June 2008. (Subscription required)
- ^ Ryder, Stephen P. "Patricia Cornwell and Walter Sickert: A Primer". Casebook: Jack the Ripper. Retrieved 10 March 2008.
- ^ Sturgis, Matthew (3 November 2002). "Making a killing from the Ripper". The Sunday Times
- ^ "Special Collections". Islington Local History Centre. Archived from the original on 29 October 2013. Retrieved 28 September 2013.
- ^ "Archival material relating to Walter Sickert". UK National Archives.
- ^ "Sickert: A Life in Art". National Museums Liverpool. Retrieved 25 November 2021.
- ^ "'Sickert: A Life in Art' – media release". Walker Art Gallery. National Museums Liverpool. Retrieved 24 June 2021.
- ^ "Walter Sickert – Press Release". Tate Britain. Tate. Retrieved 26 April 2022.
- ^ Jones, Jonathan (26 April 2022). "Walter Sickert review – serial killer, fantasist or self-hater? This hellish, brilliant show only leaves questions". The Guardian. Guardian News & Media Limited. Retrieved 26 April 2022.
Bibliography
- Baron, Wendy (1973). Sickert. London: Phaidon Press Ltd.
- Baron, Wendy (1979). The Camden Town Group. London: Scolar Press.
- Baron, Wendy (September 1980). "The Perversity of Walter Sickert". Arts Magazine. pp. 125–29.
- Baron, Wendy and Shone, Richard, eds. (1992). Sickert: Paintings ("Catalogue of the exhibition held at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, from November 1992 to February 1993".) New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-05395-9(paper).
- Baron, Wendy (2006). Sickert: Paintings and Drawings. Yale University Press, 2006.
- Bromberg, Ruth (2000). Walter Sickert, Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné. Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
- Browse, Lillian, ed. (1943). Sickert, with an essay on his life and notes on his paintings; and with an essay on his art by R. H. Wilenski. London: Faber and Faber.
- Browse, Lillian (1960). Sickert. London: Rupert Hart-Davis.
- Chambers, Emma, ed. (2022). Walter Sickert. Tate, accompanying a Tate Britain exhibition.
- Corbett, David Peters (2001). Walter Sickert. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
- Emmons, Robert (1941). The Life and Opinions of Walter Richard Sickert. London: Faber and Faber, Ltd.
- Hartley, Cathy. "Gosse, (Laura) Sylvia (1881–1968)". A Historical Dictionary of British Women. London and New York: Europa Publications, 2003 (rev. ed. of The Europa Biographical Dictionary of British Women, 1983).
- Keenan McDonald, Charlotte (2021). Sickert: A Life in Art. National Museums Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery. Exhibition catalog.
- Lilly, Marjorie (1973). Sickert: The Painter and His Circle. Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes Press. Lilly (1891–1980) was a friend of Sickert's and "closely associated with his circle."
- Moorby, Nicola (2012). "Walter Richard Sickert 1860–1942," artist biography, May 2006, in Helena Bonett, Ysanne Holt, Jennifer Mundy (eds.), The Camden Town Group in Context, Tate
- Michael Parkin Fine Art Ltd. and The Maltzahn Gallery Ltd. (1974). The Sickert Women and the Sickert Girls: Walter Sickert with Therese Lessore, Sylvia Gosse, Wendela Boreel, Marjorie Lilly, Christiana Cutter: 18 April to 18 May 1974. London: Parkin Gallery.
- Robins, Anna Gruetzner and Thomson, Richard (2005). Degas, Sickert, and Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris, 1870–1910. London: Tate Publishing. (Catalog for 2005–2006 Tate Britain exhibition listed below under External links)
- Robins, Anna Gruetzner. "Walter Sickert: Art Critic for the New Age" (includes links to nine of Sickert's reviews for the New Age).
- ISBN 0198172257
- ISBN 1-85437-008-1
- Shone, Richard (1988). Walter Sickert. Oxford: Phaidon.
- Shone, Richard (2021). Sickert: The Theatre of Life. Piano Nobile, 2021.
- Sickert, Walter; Hollis, Marianne, Hayward Gallery, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts & Wolverhampton Art Gallery (1981). Late Sickert: Paintings 1927 to 1942. London: Arts Council of Great Britain. ISBN 0-7287-0301-7
- Sickert, Walter (November 1917). "Memories of ISBN 978-1-84368-080-2. Reprinted in Sitwell, Osbert (ed.), A Free House!.
- Sickert, Walter (21 July 1910). "The naked and the Nude". New Age, 21 July 1910, pp. 276–7. Reprinted in Robins, Anna Gruetzner (ed.), Walter Sickert: The Complete Writings on Art, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 261. Also reprinted in Sitwell, Osbert (ed.), A Free House!, p. 323. See commentary under Wright, Barnaby, below.
- Sitwell, Osbert, ed. (1947). A Free House! Or the Artist as Craftsman: Being the Writings of Walter Richard Sickert. London: Macmillan & Co. (reprinted by Arcade Press, 2012, consulting editor Deborah Rosenthal.)
- ISBN 0-618-08251-4(pbk)
- Sturgis, Matthew (2005). Walter Sickert: A Life. Comprehensive biography of Sickert – in the final chapter Sturgis refutes the notion that Sickert was Jack the Ripper, but also claims that if Sickert were still alive he would enjoy his current notoriety.
- Tickner, Lisa (2000). "Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Murder and Tabloid Crime", in Tickner, Lisa, Modern Life & Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 11–47.
- Travers, Matthew (2021). Walter Sickert: The Theatre of Life. London: Piano Nobile.
- Upstone, Robert (2008). Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London, 2008 ISBN 1-85437-781-7
- Upstone, Robert (2009). Sickert in Venice, exhibition catalogue, Dulwich Picture Gallery, ISBN 978-1-85759-583-3
- Wilcox, T., Causey, A., Checketts, L., Peppiatt, M., Manchester City Art Gallery, Barbican Art Gallery, & Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum (1990). The Pursuit of the Real: British Figurative Painting from Sickert to Bacon. London: Lund Humphries in association with Manchester City Art Galleries. ISBN 0-85331-571-X
- Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1950.
- Wright, Barnaby. "Walter Sickert: 'The naked and the Nude'" (about Sickert's article of that name listed above).
External links
- 279 artworks by or after Walter Sickert at the Art UK site
- Tate biography and gallery
- TATE BRITAIN EXHIBITION: WALTER SICKERT, 28 April – 18 September 2022 Crewe, Tom, "Real Busters"
- Walter Sickert: Painting and transgressing, Petit Palais, Paris, 14 October 2022 to 29 January 2023 "The Petit Palais has partnered with the Tate Britain to present the very first major retrospective in France dedicated to the English painter Walter Sickert". Review: Platzer, David, "Man of masks & shadows", The New Criterion, January 26, 2023.
- TATE BRITAIN EXHIBITION: DEGAS, SICKERT AND TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, LONDON AND PARIS 1870–1910. 5 OCTOBER 2005 – 15 JANUARY 2006 At The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. 18 February — 14 May 2006.
- Sickert: A Life in Art, 18 Sep 2021—27 Feb 2022, Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool.
- "Post-Impressionists", Walter Sickert's review in Manet and the Post-Impressionists" exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, 1910.
- Works by or about Walter Sickert at Internet Archive
- "Archival material relating to Walter Sickert". UK National Archives.