Arts & Culture
Forgotten favourites - Painting with words. Walter Sickert wrote as he painted - from an intellectual distance. His essays are a perfect antidote to today's ponderous art criticism, argues George Walden
Published 01 December 2003
A Free House! Or the Artist as Craftsman
Edited by Osbert Sitwell Macmillan (out of print)
Walter Sickert was not just one of the best of an admittedly thin field of 20th-century British artists: he could write beautifully. His tough-minded yet entertaining essays and articles, now mostly out of print, are a perfect antidote to today's ponderous vaporisings about art - and incidentally to the solemnly silly idea popularised by Patricia Cornwell that Sickert was Jack the Ripper. Nabokov said that you could rely on a murderer to have a fancy prose style, but serial dismemberers of women do not write like Sickert, whose style was the opposite of fancy; it is factual and intelligent, truthful but humane.
In his art criticism, judgements and opinions, this writer of foreign extraction (his father was Danish) was the epitome of the Johnsonian truth-to-life approach that the English are so proud of and so easily abandon for pomposity or whimsy. He was especially so in the Edwardian times that he lived through. A fine teacher who once taught painting in night school, he ridiculed the notion, already current, that more resources for art would generate a cornucopia of returns in kind. To him it seemed astonishing that the taxpayer should be called upon to pay him to encourage talent-free bourgeois housewives to daub away to no one's benefit, while working men were being paid miserable sums to do such useful things as driving a bus. Sickert was the first to spot the philistinism of the notion that money makes artists, and that the future of British art could be assured if only the rulers of the day would release a small fund secreted somewhere in the Treasury.
A friend of both Whistler and Degas, and luckily for his writing as well as his painting, he was influenced more by the penetrating, rough-tongued Frenchman than by the equally witty but more brittle American. His writing shows how deeply rooted he was in the physical practice of his art - the artist as craftsman - and a muscular intellect kept him from the cant and posturing that, then as now, afflicted so much writing on the subject. Full of brilliant apercus of the artists of his day, he was especially good on Whistler, for whom he had worked as a studio assistant after studying at the Slade and whose technical inadequacies and visual evasions he knew too well.
His judgement of him was a typical mixture of mordancy, humanity and shrewdness: "How much these pictures required the defence of the brilliant and sympathetic personality who produced them." And how smart of Sickert to foresee the modern fashion for celebrity art - the artist as his own primary creation - which Whistler began. His own later, photography-based portraits, notably of the Prince of Wales, with their proto-Lichtensteinian tachisme, were also in advance of their time, but Sickert was too honest an artist to make a big theoretical deal out of his photographic interests, and there is something humorous in these overblown and not entirely successful pieces which are neither strident nor crude enough to appeal today. Sceptical and sardonic, frequently he painted as he wrote - from a certain intellectual distance.
Though a convivial man he was something of an outsider, with his foreign blood and disinclination to adhere for long to any caste or clique, even the Camden Town Group, of which he was the leading member. He resigned from the Royal Academy resoundingly a year after his election and had the good taste never to fall into Bloomsbury's moist embrace. Always he was hard to categorise. An impressionist who worked with tones rather than with light, he found himself overtaken and to an extent isolated by post-impressionism and a rising British interest in cubism and fauvism. Though handsome and charming, he never fitted in fully to London life, spending many a year abroad in Dieppe or Venice, and preferring Bath and Brighton to the capital as he grew older.
However fresh, spirited and journalistic his pieces appear, he clearly worked on his prose as he worked on his painting technique (his studio was said to be as elaborate as that of an Old Master, complete with assistants). Delacroix apart, there are remarkably few painters who could write, partly because writing about painting is so difficult. The proof that Sickert could do it can be found in A Free House! Or the Artist as Craftsman, a collection of his writings edited by Osbert Sitwell and published by Macmillan in 1947, five years after the artist's death at the age of 81. Until some publisher sees the light, you will have to borrow it from a library or pay between £15 and £60 for a second-hand copy.
George Walden's most recent book is Who's a Dandy? (Gibson Square)
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