Word: sickert
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...