Music Halls, Murder and Tabloid Pix

By ROBERT HUGHES

Some artists drop through the cracks, and for a long time, it looked as though Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) was one of them. His retrospective at London's Royal Academy of Arts, curated by Wendy Baron and Richard Shone (until mid-February, then at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam), is the first deep look at Sickert the British have had in almost 30 years. In America, he is virtually unknown. No museum has ever acknowledged him, and if you dip for his work into the big public collections, let alone the private ones, you will come up empty. Ditto in France, where he spent a lot of his working life.

Only in Britain is this Danish-British painter known, and only there is his influence felt. As a modern Realist, he energized younger British Modernists in the 1900s like Spencer Frederick Gore and Harold Gilman. You can still see his mark today, on the work of figurative artists like Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and even Francis Bacon. Sickert's "brown world" of rented rooms in Camden Town, with their plump, sweaty nudes, sprawled on iron bedsteads, dense and claustrophobic, runs into the younger painters', its solidly constructed Realism forming a bridge across the light turbulence of derivative avant- gardism in so much British art.

An unspectacular painter, you might think -- but take care. For it was also Sickert who in his old age, during the 1930s, became obsessed with mass-media images. Decades before American Pop, and to the consternation of most critics, he made signery into scenery, recycling theater publicity photos, news shots (of the King with his horse trainer or Amelia Earhart being mobbed at the London airport) and even a gangster-movie poster of Edward G. Robinson. No American or European artist at the time used such sources with as much aplomb. Scorning British good taste and the Edwardian artist's role as the groom of new aristocrats -- a task he left to what he called the "wriggle and chiffon" school of portraiture, led by the American expatriate John Singer Sargent -- Sickert went down a few class notches, looking for a virile, demotic way of painting that did something more with popular culture than peer at it from above.

As Shone writes in the catalog, Sickert's career ran parallel to all the great Modernist movements from the 1880s to the 1930s but belonged to none of them. He was "a passionately self-isolating figure . . . highly individual, combining expected elements of the European mainstream with personal tastes that can appear willful or mandatory." He was also a witty and truthful art critic, whose essays and journalism, collected in 1947 by Osbert Sitwell under the title A Free House!, are never dull and often possess a Shavian energy. Courageous to the point of eccentricity, Sickert always followed his own nose.

It led him, first, to France. Sickert was the main link between European and British painting at the turn of the century: the son of a Danish father and an Anglo-Irish mother, born in Munich, fluent in German and French. When the general histories of modern art mention him at all, it's as a small footnote to the Symbolists and the Postimpressionists, like Bonnard (the nudes in bedrooms) or Toulouse-Lautrec (the music-hall scenes). But one needs to remember that Sickert was slightly older than most of these painters. He was born in 1860; they hardly influenced him at all. The men who did were pre- rather than Postimpressionist: Whistler, Manet and, above all, Degas. Sickert had worked for Whistler as a studio assistant in the early 1880s, and Whistler gave him a letter of introduction to Degas. A strong friendship grew up between the two men.

Just as Whistler honed Sickert's taste for art-world polemics and politics, so his long association with Degas steered him away from being a provincial Impressionist, grazing on first sensations. Construct in the studio, do studies, mistrust "the tyranny of nature." And if you want narrative, why not have it? The world, especially the city -- for Sickert was an intensely urban painter -- was crammed with narratives, and like Degas, Sickert found his in closed rooms and places of popular entertainment. For Degas's cafes concerts, Sickert substituted the British music hall, then at its apex of rowdy success.

He loved the stage; British paintings like Gallery of the Old Bedford treat the worn, overloaded gilt-and-mirror interiors with the seriousness another artist might have brought to an Italian church. Since Sickert had spent time in Venice, there may be some subliminal connection between the clusters of audience in derby hats, leaning precariously from the balconies and reflected in the mirrors, and the more elegant crowds that thronged Tiepolo's ceilings. Sickert never condescended, and his portraits of the now forgotten stars of this dead form of entertainment are done with fine straightforwardness: The Lion Comique, 1887 (patter singers in white tie were known as "lions" or "mammoths" in the stage argot of the day), with his baggy tails and painted backdrop of a lake, is seen as precisely as any Manet.

Sickert's pictures of seedy domestic boredom, violence and the aftermath of murder seemed much more problematical, and they still do. In 1907 a blond prostitute was found with her throat cut in a rented room in Camden Town. This killing, close to Sickert's London lodgings, gave him a subject. Through 1908-09, he painted a series of harsh, dark images of a naked woman on a bed and a clothed man -- shades of Manet's Dejeuner! -- glaring down at her. In L'Affaire de Camden Town, 1909, she seems to be alive but cowering from him; with its sexual frankness (disconcerting to taste in 1909), heavy claustrophobic patterning and leaden light, it is a sinister painting, like a Vuillard whose domestic narrative has gone wrong. It isn't surprising to learn that Sickert was interested in the story of Jack the Ripper. But the truly bizarre twist was the rumor that sprang up 20 years after Sickert's death -- that he actually was the Ripper himself. Alas, there is no evidence for this bit of urban mythology.

Sickert may have been an intimist, of a peculiar sort, in such paintings, but there is no doubt of his later nostalgia for the kind of public declamation that the great tradition of earlier painting could fill. "We - cannot well have pictures on a large scale nowadays," he remarked, "but we can have small fragments of pictures on a colossal scale."

Such a work was his huge self-portrait head with a patriarchal beard, The Servant of Abraham, 1929. Another, majestic in its broken dark-green underwater light, was The Raising of Lazarus, circa 1929, which he worked up from a composite photo of a life-size articulated dummy being delivered to his London studio. For by now, Sickert's interests were shifting decisively to photography -- much to the puzzlement of the London art world. Photos were common speech, immediate, iconic but not "sensitive." They stood the Impressionist cult of the nuance on its head. And turning the black-and-white of photography back into color represented a fascinating challenge for a tonal painter like Sickert.

Working from photographs -- whether specially taken for the painting or clipped from the press -- produced some of Sickert's most engrossing images. Among them are his 1929 portrait of the novelist Hugh Walpole and The Miner, circa 1935: a man just out of the pit, fiercely kissing his wife, an abrupt and passionate painting imbued with sooty grain that reminds one of late Goya. Photographs also enabled Sickert to produce, in 1936, what is probably the last portrait of a British royal personage that can claim serious aesthetic merit: Edward VIII, emerging from a limousine, clutching his black fur busby like a teddy bear. The monarch, who was shortly to abdicate, looks remarkably wan and shifty, and it's hard not to imagine that in this picture the Servant of Abraham was granted a moment of prophecy.