Tag Archives: Walter Sickert

PART 10: WALTER SICKERT (1860-1942)

On then to Walter Sickert, Whistler’s pupil and etching assistant. We need to keep in mind that late 19th-century Britain is characterised by the art of genteel retreat. It was French art that saw the densest flowering of artistic innovation in history – Monet, Degas, Gauguin, Cezanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, Picasso, Braque, Bonnard, Vuillard and Matisse. These were the great visual philosophers – reflecting the new conditions of a new age and embracing the difficult, differing and perplexing life of the city, new technologies and potentialities of man. But these new styles were unwelcome in Britain because they went against moral principles and met with emotional disgust.

Minnie Cunningham at the Old Bedford (1892), Tate, London

British art at this time was slick, emotionally and intellectually vacant. Even Whistler, an American in London, was producing aesthetically pleasing night time views of London and the Thames in the abstract style developed by Turner. Roger Fry’s pioneering London exhibitions of French Post-Impressionism in London in 1910 and 1912 were described by one reviewer as ‘part of a widespread plot to destroy the whole fabric of European painting’. So, into this arena enters Walter Sickert…

Sickert is one of the most imaginative British artists who captured a low-life, late Victorian world of music halls and shadowy interiors – one of the most compelling artists in the history of early modern British art. He wasn’t afraid to put sex and sleaze into his art when most British artist were timid and repressed in terms of their subjects. Sickert dared to depict the radical urban danger that artists in Paris were so alive to.

La Hollandaise (c.1906), Tate, London

Sickert was born in Munich, Germany in 1860. In 1868 the family settled in Britain where the young Sickert first sought a career as an actor. He took up art in 1881 at Slade School – after a year he left to become a pupil and etching assistant to our friend, James Abbott McNeill Whistler. In 1883 he travelled to Paris and met Edgar Degas – and he was especially impressed by the urban realism developed by Manet and Degas. He valued the haphazard and impure texture of modern city life. He cultivated a style of painting with that glancing, snapshot quality which produced the most extraordinary art of the early modern period in British art. Sickert frequented London’s music halls, especially The Standard where George Leybourne sang Champagne Charlie and his favourite – The Old Bedford and the regular performed Minnie Cunningham. He also painted the audiences which have a ghostly quality – rapt monkeys in the dark – a flickering, gaslit human zoo.

The Old Bedford (1895), Walker, Liverpool

Sickert used the popular theatre as a metaphor for existenceHe said he wanted his pictures to be like ‘pages torn from the book of life’. There’s a melancholy combined with ragged vitality.

In 1905 Sickert settled in Camden, North London – and lived among the navvies, shift-workers and prostitutes who also became his subjects. His Camden Town Nude series depicts prostitutes, liverish green in colour and sprawling on unmade beds in dark, dingy rooms. It’s another side of Edwardian life to the society portraits being produced by successful portrait artists like Whistler and Sargent.

In late 1920s and 30s he pushed painting into places it hadn’t been before by using photography and other media anticipating the art of the 1970s. His chief legacy is his realism – he gave British art back its British temperament.

Next time…

So, Sickert, influenced by Degas and Monet, introduced a sense of realism into British art. I mentioned Roger Fry’s exhibitions of French Post-Impressionism that were a desperate attempt to get London interested in the innovations going on in Paris – well somebody who was taking notice was another member of the Bloomsbury Group of which Fry was also part – Vanessa Bell.

Studland Beach (c. 1912) Vanessa Bell, Tate, London

The Eastenders that time forgot

The East London Group of ArtistsLast year David Buckman published his extensive research on the East London Group of Artists in his fascinating book From Bow to Biennale: Artists of the East London Group.  Now here’s the exhibition to accompany the book – and it’s a corker.

The East London Group of Artists were a very successful gang of painters which existed for over 10 years from the late 1920s.  In their day they were both an innovative and popular artistic movement – but they have subsequently (and very sadly) been passed over by art history.  In their heyday there were about 35 members of the group, mostly working class, realist painters who progressed to phenomenal critical acclaim by chronicling life in east London between the World Wars.

Harold Steggles, Old Ford Rd, c.1932
Harold Steggles, Old Ford Rd, c.1932

The majority of them came from humble beginnings, but their artistic talent was to flourish under the mentorship of Slade School of Fine Arts trained artist John Cooper, and the Camden Town Group member, Walter Sickert.  Their success led to artists from the group representing Britain, alongside such luminaries as Barbara Hepworth and Gilbert Spencer, at the 1936 Venice Biennale.  This is the first time their pictures have been displayed publicly for over a generation.

Sunday Morning Farringdon Rd (c.1929) by Cecil Osborne
Sunday Morning Farringdon Rd (c.1929) by Cecil Osborne

Maybe it’s because I’m familiar with this part of London, but I found these paintings of eerily empty streets both haunting and poignant.  The paintings convey a tender affection for the area and recognise beauty in the urban milieu.  Reminding me of Edward Hopper’s American townscapes – although these artists are unlikely to have been aware of their US contemporary – this exhibition of coolly atmospheric paintings is well worth a visit.

‘The East End Group of Artists: From Bow to Biennale c. 1928-1936’ is currently showing at the Nunnery Gallery, 181 Bow Road, London E3 2SJ, until 13 July, open Tues-Sun, 10am-5pm.  It’s totally free and there’s an excellent independent café attached.

I’ll be talking about the East London Group of Artists and discussing this exhibition on the Serendipitous Compendium hosted by John Stanford broadcast on Radio Crackle on Sunday 25 May.