Word: sickert
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...