“These personas he adopted were almost emulating music hall performers in paint.”ĭuring the 1880s and 1890s, venues for variety shows were under moral scrutiny. “We don’t know why he stopped acting but we do know he admired performers,” said Kennedy. Those who knew him claimed that it was impossible to discover the man behind his many personas and egos,” she says. “Until his old age Sickert continued to be a consummate performer who loved to appear in fresh disguises and had a bewildering number of ways of speaking and behaving. ![]() “Did he dye his facial hair and leave his bushy eyebrows untrimmed, or has he pasted on a false beard and eyebrows for a bit of make-believe?” asks the Sickert expert Anna Gruetzner Robins. One self-portrait, The Juvenile Lead, shows Sickert in the role of an English intellectual, while in his The Bust of Tom Sayers: a Self-Portrait (1913-15), he poses in a beard next to a marble bust of a celebrated Victorian bare-knuckle fighter. Photograph: James Mann/Tateīut it was the stage, and the chance to pretend, that was perhaps the key influence on his work. Little Dot Hetherington at the Bedford Music Hall (1888–89), another study of the performer at work. This interest in news reflected in art was controversial at the time, but in an interview for the Pall Mall Gazette titled The Gospel of Impressionism, Sickert made his position clear: “We don’t go back to other days,” the artist said. Sickert was doing it 60 or 70 years before.” “The idea that artists only started playing with public images of themselves in recent times is wrong. It is based on a 1932 photograph of Sickert, looking old, arriving at the Royal Academy of Arts on Piccadilly to see his own work,” he said. “We have another work from the National Portrait Gallery, Self-Portrait in Grisaille (1935), which shows how self-aware he was. Kennedy argues that the artist also had a radically sophisticated approach to newspaper coverage and was often inspired by stories, including those about himself. Remember, too, that Sickert saw himself as a perpetual enfant terrible.” “He thought the British approach to the subject was too polite and too concerned with status. ![]() “He was reacting against the idealised nude,” says Sturgis. While such pictures were common across the Channel, particularly in the work of Degas, the friend who most influenced Sickert, and Bonnard, Britain remained in a prudish pre-Raphaelite phase, depicting women as angels, or as a Venus emerging from the waves. The influence of French impressionists on his portraits of nudes was scandalous at the time. “It was an unfortunate conflation of events of Sickert’s own murder painting, and then the story told to him by his landlady in Mornington Crescent that the Ripper had lodged there 20 years ago.” In fact, the artist was in France when the Ripper struck in 1888. Matthew Sturgis, who wrote an acclaimed biography of the artist in 2005, also regards the Ripper slur as “nonsense”. ![]() “He was very interested in Jack the Ripper, but so was everyone else.” “Sickert was almost playing up to it,” said Kennedy. And, as Kennedy points out, the Camden murder took place just around the corner from Sickert’s north London home, while his interest in Jack the Ripper was one shared by most Victorians. But this theory has been widely discredited. Infamously, Sickert’s four paintings of the Camden Town murder of 1907 led the American novelist Patricia Cornwell to argue he was actually Jack the Ripper.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |