★★★★☆
Walter Sickert is probably one of the most exciting, idiosyncratic, maligned, misunderstood, and captivating artists that Britain has ever produced. His long life and career was made up of ambiguity and contradiction. A British artist born in Germany and trained by American and French painters, an aspiring actor who turned to painting as an alternative medium to tell his stories, and a man who revelled in changing the identities and titles of both himself and his works. The smoke and mirrors that surround his life are probably what led the crime-writer Patricia Cornwell to write an allegedly ‘non-fiction’ and dubiously researched book in 2002 that presented her case for Sickert being the almost mythical serial killer Jack the Ripper. The current retrospective of his works at Tate Britain (until 18th Sept) is mercifully without such slanderous assumptions and presents Sickert as an innovative and experimental painter with a long and varied career.
Sickert only spent a short time at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art, seeming to prosper better working in the studio of established artists, preparing their pallets and watching them work with some tutelage along the way. For periods in the 1880s, he was apprentice to both the American-Londoner and radical James Abbott McNeill Whistler, as well as the prominent French painter Edgar Degas, thereby linking Sickert to the strong lineage of innovative art that ran back through the French Impressionists to Manet and Courbet.
The first couple of rooms at Tate focus on Sickert’s complex personal identity and his training under these two major artists. A lesser painter might have withered in the shadow of these canonical teachers, but not Sickert. A series of compelling comparisons of works by both Whistler and the juvenile Sickert on similar subjects – gloomy shop-fronts in the French coastal resort of Dieppe or moody, semi-abstract seascapes – show an influence as well and an independence. Sickert took what he liked from Whistler, his darkly monochromatic pallets, his almost liquid use of the paint, and rejected what he disliked, such as Whistler’s tendency towards ephemerality and impermanence of his subjects. Whistler paints in phantoms whilst Sickert is all about what he called the “gross material facts”.
This independence of thought is testified by the opening room that displays self-portraits from throughout Sickert’s life. With all of his identities laid out before us, we see first the mysterious, romantic youth, emerging from the gloom of a small engraving like the protagonist from a story by Poe, then the bowler-hatted artist on the make, a member of the RA and part of the cultural establishment, and finally the bearded, biblical figure, the wild prophet of a future past.
It’s a strong opening to the show which is undermined by some unfortunate choices of curation. Many of Sickert’s works are dark in tone and those done under the influence of Whistler are also very small. At Tate these nocturnal scenes, no more than one square foot, drown against vast expanses of lurid cream-yellow walls. It’s the kind of colour that makes one vaguely sea-sick and does nothing to advantage the display of these virtually back and white works. Later rooms in the show have no such issue, with larger works and more palatable and appropriate dark blues and whites on the walls. I’d recommend that the more exciting Farrow & Ball catalogues are removed from the Tate offices post haste, lest there be any further nausea-making results.
There follows a wide selection of Sickert’s images of the music halls in Camden, a subject part inherited from Degas, a point which is made by the inclusion of one of Degas’ images of the orchestra pit at the theatre loaned from the V&A. Whilst the Tate itself is very rich in Sickerts, particularly those of the music halls, the additional loans in this show are impressive with many coming from the Ashmolean in Oxford, the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, and the Courtauld, just down the river from Tate Britain, as well as a number of notable loans from private collections. Whilst the subject might come from Degas, Sickert’s theatrical paintings have a great deal more humanity about them. He rarely gives us a view of what’s going on on the stage, and when he does it’s usually secondhand, reflected in an offstage mirror, rather, his focus is on the audience and he watches them while they watch the acts. Tall thin paintings that show the middle classes in their heavily gilded boxes, or wide dark paintings displaying the hoard of working-class boys, flat-capped and crammed into the gods, straining to catch a glimpse of the songstress or dancers. Sickert inherits the urban social observations of William Hogarth, his swirls of oil paint just doing enough to pick out in the gloom the character of these city dwellers. The architecture of these theatrical interiors, all now long gone and demolished, seems to be made of a kind of rich plasma in these paintings. The overly opulent ornament, the heavy red velvet curtains, all seem to have real weight, real solidity, real dirt and dust clinging to their surfaces. These works are all about the gilt, the grime, and the gloom.
Architecture was one of Sickert’s great subjects and a couple of rooms in this show display that to great effect. Two vast paintings of the facade of San Marco, Venice, hung side-by-side, painted the same year, and yet of entirely different textures and techniques celebrate his range. Further images of Proustian resort hotels on the Normandy coast as well as the faded glamour of Brighton hang nearby. Followed by a room of images from his native London, ranging from his own back garden with his wife hanging out the washing, to the platform of a tube station bedecked in advertising, and an electrically lit department store frontage. What makes Sickert a supreme painter of architecture is his understanding that buildings are revealed by light. The shadows that play across a facade, the glow of a lit window, or the sun bouncing off metal-work all possess as much solidity as the bricks and mortar of the structure.
Whilst the shown on the whole is very comprehensive there does seem to be a strange omission of his mature paintings of Venetian architecture, away from the landmarks. Some of my very favourite Sickerts are dark, haunted works showing dilapidated palazzi and tenements rising over the brown-green canals, but none of these can be found in the show. Maybe because they tend to burst the bubble that all the canals of that city are crystal blue – as any visitor will note, Sickert gets the dirty lugubrious green just right. You can’t imagine a golden barque floating down his canals but a dead cat would look just right.
Where this show falls down is in the rooms focused on his images of people. Halfway through we are shown a room entitled ‘Beyond Portraiture’, a suitably meaningless title for a group of people-paintings which do no great service to the artist. Quite what the point is of grouping these works from the middle period of his career together is never made clear by the wall texts. The unfinished portrait of a dying, languid Aubrey Beardsley is wonderfully haunting and a couple of others show an experimental attitude towards the genre, but on the whole, these portraits are hardly great works and neither are their subjects famous characters.
The story is different when it comes to the room dedicated to Sickert’s nudes. These are astonishing paintings that delight in the textural quality of oil paint to an almost sculptural degree. A traditional subject for artists for centuries, Sickert painted female nudes throughout his career but these are not the perfect goddesses of Titian or Giorgione. In 1910 Sickert was one of the first to proclaim the fundamental difference between the ‘naked’ and the ‘nude’, a thesis later taken up and elaborated by Kenneth Clark in his book ‘The Nude.’ Sickert stated that the nude is a contrived thing, artificial in setting and subject and disconnected from reality by its striving towards perfection, whilst the naked was real, raw, colloquial and part of that world of ‘gross material facts.’ His paintings, therefore, are of real women in real places, mostly the back-bedrooms of Camden houses. Insipid grey London light leaks in through grimy windows whilst his fleshy, earthy subjects sit or lie unarranged amongst bedsheets and pillows. Their identity is sacrificed to the overall painterly form of the work, their faces often obscured in the gloom, these are studies in texture and light much like his architectural works.
But here the poor curation spoils the broth once again. In an attempt to avoid being accused of neglecting the academic and social questions that hover about these works, and in a hamfisted attempt to be considered ‘woke’, the curators have given this one room three(!) lengthy wall texts that try, and fail, to cover all bases. The physical quality of these objects as works of art doesn’t get a look-in whilst the explanations swing wildly between trying to confront such topics as the male gaze, the relationship and power dynamic between artist and sitter, the role of the female model in art, and the Victorian fascination with the grizzly female murders (with a whiff Jack the Ripper). Whilst all fascinating questions, none of them are remotely given justice in a couple of sentences crammed onto the labels. They are the kind of subject best left for the catalogue, where they can be given their full nuance and analysis. Also in this room, without much explanation in themselves, are a couple of works by Sickert’s predecessor Pierre Bonnard and the younger British artist Lucien Freud. Whilst both painters produced nudes in a similar vein to Sickert, their inclusion in this room is somewhat bizarre given the notable absence of the artist’s own students and contemporaries from the rest of the show. For example, there are no works from the other Camden Town Group painters like Spencer Gore or Harold Gilman, both of whom were close friends and studio-mates of Sickert.
The confused curatorial choices continue in a room that proclaims its subject as ‘Modern Conversation Pieces’ but contains a mixed bag of works, from his famous painting of a domestic working-class couple, Ennui, to large colourful images of Belgian soldiers, painted to raise fund to support that nation during the First World War, there seems to be no particular thematic link here. Once again the curators struggle with Sickert’s paintings of people. The room title hints toward that intriguing cross-epoch link between Sickert and Hogarth I noted previously, but this rich vein is utterly neglected by the room itself.
Thankfully, the show ends on a real high with a large, bright, white room that displays to great effect Sickert’s final period. Now an old man he turned to producing large canvases often copied from the oddly cropped press photographs he cut from the daily newspapers. A towering and slightly sheepish-looking Edward VIII disembarks from a car in full Welsh Guards uniform. Emilia Earheart is mobbed by the English press under the wing of her freshly landed aircraft at a rainy Croydon Airport. And right there in the glass case are the press clippings themselves, one can see firsthand the process that Sickert developed of transferring the strange flatness of a black and white photograph onto his thickly painted, oily canvases. Also in this room are a number of invented scenes from Shakespear plays, Othello and Romeo & Juliet, where Sickert has imagined a production with actors he’s admired throughout his life, some long dead and others just starting out when these works were painted. This final room shows that even right at the end of his life Sickert was developing new ways of handling paint, these works having a flatter, more matt and less tonal style to his earlier oeuvre, and new ways of exploring the ambiguity of character.
Walter Sickert at Tate Britain (until Sept 18th 2022) is a show which is saved by the astonishing talent of its subject. The raw physicality and enigmatic subject matter of his wide-ranging output helps carry you over some disappointing, bizarre, and downright amateur curation on the part of Tate. On leaving the show, one cannot help feeling that we have only paddled in the edges of the deep, dark pool of Sickert’s life and career, we leave with no more sense of his vexed identity than we arrived with. Connections with France, America, British Modernism and British history are hinted at but never fully elucidated. This ambiguity is probably what Sickert would have liked, but whilst the Tate show is a good amuse bouche for his career, I was left feeling like the smoke and mirrors remained firmly in place.
★★★★☆
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Morgan Haigh 