Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942)
Part One
At the beginning of the twentieth century, with a war looming just beyond the horizon, every major European city seemed to be engrossed with Modernism and modern art. All but London, that is. Perhaps because England is an island or perhaps because Great Britain, a great empire, had become self-referential. the impact of continental art, whether from France or Germany or Italy, was diluted. In 1907 the torch-bearer of what was considered the cutting edge of anti-establishment art, was a well-behaved middle aged man. On the surface, Walter Sickert was an ordinary artist of some merit, who was well-known, not because he was unique, but because he stepped into an artistic vacuum that lacked a leader. He has entered the history of British art as the older and wiser guide of young artists in London, lending gravitas to their mile-mannered ripostes to the dormant Royal Academy. But below the surface, was a tormented man, haunted by a series of gruesome murders that had occurred decades earlier, murders horribly echoed in his own neighborhood and in his own time, the Camden Town Murders. Sickert was captured by his own runaway imagination, caught between his fascination with Jack the Ripper and the killer’s descendant.
London at the beginning of the twentieth century was the largest city in the world, the center of the globe’s greatest empire, the apex of all things modern. And yet the culture was frozen in time, fixated on the long reign of Queen Victorian, continued by her son Edward VII. No modern nation had experienced such a long lasting regime–America had elections every four years, the French had a long-standing Republic with varying leaders, and Germany had a newish Kaiser–and none of its leaders had created a civilization, complete with attitudes emanating directly from a beloved monarch. Today we look back on these slower and gentler times with affection, viewing the past through Merchant and Ivory filtered lenses as a movie written by Julian Fellows. Or we shiver in delicious anticipation at the opening of a scene from Sherlock Holmes as the detective and his faithful sidekick John Watson make their way through a thick London fog in pursuit of Jack the Ripper or some other significant villain. There was an actual Victorian imagination, far more conflicted than Downton Abbey would suggest, and less concerned about introducing a telephone in the parlor than with the strange feeling that a historical period had come to an end and yet lived on, like a zombie decade, the years the proceeded the Great War.
The Belle Epoch, those last decades before 1914, had a dark side that only occasionally appears in the art of the period. This interstitial period is what makes the paintings of Walter Sickert interesting. Sometimes it is enlightening to examine the works of an artist who is not avant-garde, not especially significant in the larger scheme of art, but who somehow stumbles upon the tenor of the times. Sickert was described by Jonathan Shirland in his article, “‘A Campaign of Extermination:’ Walter Sickert and Modernism in London in 1914,” as
..a bespectacled, overweight, and aging painter decked out in checked trousers and straw boater hat is hardly suggestive of a prominent member of advanced art in the capital, let alone a potential leader of an English avant-garde. Sickert was fifty-three years old in 1913, but remained at the forefront of the most important artistic coteries to emerge after Fry’s first Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1910. The acknowledged leader of he Camden Town Group, he was also a member of the Fitzroy Street Group, was instrumental in the Allied Artists Association and was soon to be offered the presidency of the London Group. But Sickert was not straightforwardly aligned with any of the Post-Impressionists, Cubists, Futurists or Neo-Realists who could lay claim to an avant-garde practice between 1910 and 1914. Indeed, the repeatedly attacked advanced art practices in his journalism and adopted seemingly contrary positions on a wide range of art world debates.
Sickert was a follower of the artists he inherited, James Abbot McNeill Whistler and Edgar Degas, and, when one examines his works carefully, he seems to have been aware of Pierre Bonnard and the Nabis. His colors are subdued and speak in tones of Whistler’s harmonies of blues and grays, while his preoccupation with nudes suggests the obsessions of Bonnard for the unclothed female. When he lived in Dieppe and for years after he returned to London, Sickert’s nudes were often displayed on the walls of Parisian Salons, where they reminded the viewers of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. But there was a realism to Sickert’s female nudes that transcended and pushed past the voyeurism of Degas and the familiar collegiality of Lautrec with prostitutes. A better comparison for Sickert’s nudes would be as a Lucien Freud avant la lettre, because these are women exposed, not just in their raw nakedness but also in their dire poverty. These are necessary nudes, women who are forced to be naked. As in the time of Degas, there was no particular reason for a women to be to totally nude except as an act of prostitution, and the women Sickert found in London were the cousins to those of Paris–desperate women who had no choice but to degrade themselves and show their tragic lives to the male viewer.
These compulsed women, probably models whose occupations would have included prostitution, were undoubtedly part of the artist’s neighborhood in London. In 2008, the Courtauld Gallery mounted an exhibition Sickert’s Nudes. As Antoine Capet pointed out in her review of the exhibition, Sickert had moved to a deteriorating area of London, then undergoing “degentrification:”
“Camden Town, at the time a London suburb, were now split into slum tenements for the Irish navvies who had been recruited for the construction of the three great and almost contiguous railway stations of the north of the metropolis, King’s Cross, St Pancras and Euston.” It is here in this transition neighborhood that Sickert continued his quest to restore realism to the academic nude, a problem already solved by Manet and Degas, in a way that suggests a fixation on female anatomy. Capet remarked that “Critics all agree that Sickert deliberately turns the spectator into a voyeur, and the rest of the Exhibition only confirms this malaise, as his focusing on his models’ genitals becomes increasingly explicit.”
While this kind of personalized fascination is fetishistic at best, going far beyond a reply to academic art, Sickert’s focus was not atypical in an age in which women were covered up from head to toe, protected by an array of layered undergarments and topped by huge and unwhieldly headgear. Sickert was merely giving unconscious permission to the male imagination of his era to disrobe and to render passive the objects of their desire. In both his neighborhood of choice and in his paintings of female nudes, decidedly modern and unclassical, Sickert was slumming. And it was in Camden Town that a murder, reminiscent of the work of Jack the Ripper, took place in 1907. Inspired or horrified or riveted–who knows?–in 1909 Sickert painted a series of three paintings supposedly connected to the murder of a former prostitute, Emily Dimmock. Her throat was slashed but that was the only established truth. Her murderer was never found and the young housewife became yet another statistic in the murder book, and would have been forgotten, except for the connection to Jack the Ripper in the mind of the excitable public.
At the time Sickert painted the trio of paintings, the words “Camden Town Murder” did not originally appear in the title and were added two decades later. The original titles were, however, taken from a detail connected to a Jack the Ripper murder. The title What shall we do for the Rent? is suggestive of one of the Ripper’s victims who died with her rent due. In all three paintings, a nude woman lies on a narrow bed with an iron frame. In all three paintings a man is either sitting next to the passive body or standing over the recumbent woman. There is archival evidence, as Lisa Tickner pointed out in her essay for the Tate, that an early title was “Consultation,” indicating that the man and woman might be in conversation of some kind. Whatever the titles may or may not be, two problems present themselves, first there is the question of power: the clothed male and the unclothed female, the comparison between active and passive, threatening and helpless. However Sickert’s scenes were judged by the viewers when they were exhibited in 1911, such a juxtaposition seems frightening to today’s women. Second, there is the question of whether or not the woman is alive and conversing with the man or is dead and is being examined for some reason. Tickner wrote that
Sickert’s titles were often mischievous, misleading or irrelevant. In a probably apocryphal anecdote Frank Rutter suggested that The Camden Town Murder was later exhibited as Father Comes Home and finally found a purchaser as The Germans in Belgium; and Quentin Bell suggested that Sickert’s titles were ‘added haphazard for the sake of a private joke or the better bamboozlement of later historians..Roger Fry, reviewing Sickert in theNation in 1911, ignored his titles and downplayed his subject matter. According to Fry, he is ‘almost indifferent to what he paints, his care being altogether for the manner of it’; and he has ‘steadily refused to acknowledge the effect upon the mind of the associated ideas of objects; he has considered solely their pictorial value as opposed to their ordinary emotional quality.’
Tickner concluded,
Sickert was cavalier about titles. In 1910 he wrote: “Pictures, like streets and persons, have to have names to distinguish them. But their names are not definitions of them, or, indeed, anything but the loosest kind of labels that make it possible for us to handle them, that prevent us from mislaying them, or sending them to the wrong address.”
Regardless of the whether the titles were serious or unserious, responding to a current event or added years later, the Camden Town series and the inherent sexism and latent violence, whether physical or social, in these paintings is so striking that the Camden series has a reputation that outweighs the minor fame of Walter Sickert. But why is this minor artist, who seemed determined to fight a rear guard action on behalf of fin-de-siècle artists, of any interest today? He was not the beginning of any art movement, he positioned himself at the end of an artistic proposition that was already passé. He fought against the future, even against the present. Sickert however was typical of his era: he lived on this bitter end edge of the Edwardian period and like this drawn out decade, the artist had outlived his own time. In his art, Sickert froze in amber all the anxieties of the Belle Epoch. In the next post, the surprising and even sensational reason for the current interest in this obscure artist will be discussed.
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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.
Thank you.