WALTER SICKERT at the TATE BRITAIN on TUESDAY 26th April 2022

 WALTER SICKERT at the TATE BRITAIN on TUESDAY 26^th April 2022

 

Brighton Pierrots by Walter Sickert, 1915

Walter Sickert was born in Munich in 1860 and eight years later travelled with his family to London.  His father was also an artist, indeed Sickert began his career by imitating his father’s work.  Sickert initially trained as an actor, indeed fascination with the theatre is in evidence throughout his career.  Sickert trained at the Slade School of Fine Art before working as an assistant to established artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) in 1882.

Walter Sickert, Self-Portrait 1896

Sickert adopted Whistler’s signature style of muted tones and dull, realist colours.  However, by 1885 Sickert had met French artist Edgar Degas (1834-1917).  He began to follow Degas’s meticulous preparation which included a planning grid and bolder use of colour.  This can be observed in works like Shop Front, The Laundry (1885, pencil, pen, and ink on paper) and The Red Shop (or the October Sun) c1888, oil paint on panel.

The Red Shop by Walter Sickert

Sickert’s most productive period came when the influence of Degas led him to depict music halls, but also circuses, outdoor vaudeville acts, and cinemas which were beginning to replace the music hall from the early Twentieth century onwards.  At the time Sickert’s critics firmly believed that popular entertainment was an unsuitable subject for fine art but in works like The New Bedford (1907-9, oil and tempera paint on canvas) Sickert charts the rise of music hall entertainment near his home in Mornington Crescent, London.  Sickert is believed to have painted the first depiction of a film screening in 1906 in Gallery of the Old Mogul (oil on canvas) the Old Mogul being the original name of the Middlesex Music Hall near Drury Lane.

Gallery of the Old Bedford, 1894-5

To enhance his reputation and obtain a regular income which somehow eluded him, Sickert attempted to become a society portraitist.  However, he had no commissions, so the work never benefitted him financially.  Notable is his portrait of Aubrey Beardsley (1894), editor of The Yellow Book, a notorious fin de siècle journal.  Beardsley is depicted crossing Hampstead Heath on the way to a celebration of the life of John Keats who, like Beardsley himself, died of tuberculosis.  Sickert is utilising impressionist and post-impressionist techniques and the pointillist style pioneered by Georges Seurat. 

Little Dot Hetherington at the Bedford Music Hall by Walter Sickert, 1888-1889 

Sickert also travelled to the continent to paint and lived in Dieppe from 1898 to 1905 where he completed many studies of light at different times of day at the church of St Jacques.  He was inspired by the work of Claude Monet and his study of effets at Rouen Cathedral and by the paintings of Dieppe completed by another leading Impressionist, Camille Pisarro.  From 1895 onwards he travelled many times to Venice, a mecca for artists, to paint typical scenes such as the Grand Canal, the Doge’s Palace, and St Marks.  Sickert’s close association with French art extended to include an appreciation of fauvism and the Nabis group of artists.  He depicted the urban environment and began to complete bigger paintings of street scenes with more vivid use of colour, a transition which was encouraged by his French dealers.

Horses of St Marks by Walter Sickert, 1901-06

Sickert is said to have re-invigorated painting of the nude in Britain.  His nudes were inspired by the work of Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) and Edgar Degas who wanted to modernise the nude by painting it in urban settings.  French critics applauded Sickert’s nudes, but British critics objected to Sickert’s subjects, working class women in contemporary settings.  Of course, the implication of poverty and prostitution upset British critics who preferred to turn a blind eye to such things, whereas the continental attitude was much more radical and transparent.  Sickert’s nudes influenced modern British artists like Lucien Freud (1922-2011) and Francis Bacon (1909-1992), but they have also been criticised in terms of objectification of the male gaze by feminist art critics.

La Hollandaise by Walter Sickert, c.1906

The exhibition also handles the issue of Sickert as Jack the Ripper head on in terms of his set of paintings and preparatory sketches for The Camden Town Murder (1908).  This work concerns the murder of Emily Dimmock, a prostitute, in Camden Town in 1907, years after the Ripper killings.  The theory of Sickert as the Ripper was conceived in 1976 by Stephen Knight in his book Jack the Ripper: the Final Solution and then by American crime fiction writer Patricia Cornwell in her 2002 book Portrait of a killer: Jack the Ripper – case closed from suggestions in his paintings of low life scenes of prostitutes and possibly rape and murder but also so-called “expert” testimony that have been exposed as sham and concoctions.  However, Cornwell has no evidence that Sickert was the Ripper.  At the time of the five Whitechapel murders Sickert was a suspect, but he had an alibi, being in France while four of the murders were committed.  There is a suggestion that the writing paper Sickert used was the same as the paper that some of Jack’s letters to the police were written on, but these have long been suspected to have been hoaxes except for the ’From Hell’ letter sent to George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee in October 1888.  There is still no evidence to connect Sickert to the murders and Cornwell’s allegation seem to stem from the same kind of objection to Sickert’s paintings made by contemporary critics, that subjects like working class women are no subject for fine art.  If so, Cornwell has deduced, there must be some other reason, but this is highly unlikely.  Sickert was a progressive figure in the art world dealing with working class culture in a highly original way.  There’s no suggestion that there’s anything more to Sickert than the work of an artist exploring something new, a task that every artist should feel duty bound to do.  Also, Sickert is hardly in position to sue Cornwell for libel, is he?

L'Hotel Royale Dieppe by Walter Richard Sickert 1894

Nevertheless, Sickert was undoubtedly fascinated by the Ripper’s murders and completed a painting entitled Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom (1905-7) based on his belief that he had lodged in a room previously occupied by the Ripper.  Sickert’s landlady believed that the previous occupier who lodged there in 1881 was none other than the Ripper.  Sickert was fascinated by crime, mystery and once said ‘murder is as good a theme as any other.’ 

Ennui by Walter Sickert, 1914

Sickert began to incorporate photography and photographic technology into his painting. The exhibition includes a camera lucida instrument which Sickert used to scale up photographs onto large canvases.  In the 1920s and 1930s he began painting large scale works from press-cuttings.  These were brighter and bolder works, depicting major Royals, members of the aristocracy, celebrities like Amelia Earhart whose solo flight he captured from a news photograph in May 1932.  He also painted his favourite actresses such as Peggy Ashcroft and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies.  His use of photography anticipates later developments in abstract expressionism and pop art.

Tate Britain’s new exhibition Walter Sickert is a must-see event that tells us much of what we need to know about the evolution of popular and populist art in Britain over the last 150 years.  It is fascinating but the object of interest are Sickert’s paintings, not the irrelevant tittle tattle surrounding him.

Paul Murphy, Tate Britain, April 2022

Pimlico by Walter Sickert c 1937