Word: sickert
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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British painter Walter Sickert reveled in ordinary subjects...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...