Walter Richard Sickert - The Trapeze, 1920
(Picture: The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)One of the first things we learn about Walter Sickert in this marvellously comprehensive exhibition is that he was an actor and showman at the start. His artist father Oswald persuaded him of the instability of an artist’s life and so he spent three years as a minor actor attached to Sir Henry Irving’s company.
That early calling materialises in much of his work, not just in his studies of music halls – and there’s never been a richer celebration of that working class haven – but in the sheer drama of light and shade that invests his art. Sickert the failed actor transmutes all the poignant glitter of life in the spotlight into the theatricality of much of his painting. There are spirited depictions of the heroines of the music hall stage – Minnie Cunningham in a blaze of scarlet at the Old Bedford, say – but also of the rapt audience of young men in bowler hats. The male gaze here is intent and transfixed. Indeed he follows the music halls into their later incarnations as picture-houses; he was one of the first to paint people waiting to watch a film. His capacity for playing a role, which all his acquaintance observed, served him well in the mutations of his self-portraits.
This is a wonderful show. It represents every stage of his career, though the biographical details are oddly slight. But his evolution as an artist is richly documented. There’s his early apprenticeship to Whistler, making up his prints and mixing the great man’s paints, which ended with Sickert, as so often happened with Whistler, falling out with him. The work done under his influence looks here like so many studies in brown. Degas was a happier influence, not just in his systematic technique – laying out his work in grid and working up layers of paint – but in his bold colours and demotic approach.
One of the purposes of this exhibition is to emphasise the French influence on Sickert. He was born in Germany to a German father, but artistically he fits in the company of Degas, Courbet, Bonnard. He spent much of his time in France, especially Dieppe where he painted both sea and buildings. But his preoccupations were the same, whether there or in Camden Town where he worked and lived, or in Venice; the Impressionist project to represent the lives of ordinary people and environments, rendered extraordinary. Artists and writers featured too; his depiction of Aubrey Beardsley as a lanky Euclidean line – length without breadth – is brilliant.
His distinction between nudes and nakedness is represented in a room of women, legs akimbo on rumpled sheets or sitting on iron bedsteads, very much naked rather than nude. Contemporaries unhesitatingly identified the sordid poverty of prostitution, but in most, there’s an undeniable erotic charge, and in the case of the Camden Murder series, a tragic aspect. Incidentally, it’s hard to reconcile the humanity of his depictions of women with the theory that he was, in fact, Jack the Ripper. Sickert’s name was one of many linked to the identity of the Whitechapel murderer. He did, it seems, send off to the authorities two or three letters in the guise of the Ripper, and was like everyone else, fascinated by the case, but the art tells another story.
He was still painting well into the Thirties, crashing through the neat categories in our heads about the division of art by periods. So when we find him painting Edward VIII (his use of newspaper photographs was innovative and influential), Edith Evans on stage and the very modern suited Lord Henderson, the reaction of most of us is – what, you still here? He was, depicting life as drama right until the end.
