WELCOME from the editor

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I’m looking forward to viewing the major Walter Sickert (1860–1942) retrospective opening at Tate Britain on April 28 (until September 18). Recognised as one of the most important artists of the 20th century and having helped shape the development of British art throughout this period, his reputation as an influential painter’s painter makes his work as relevant to today’s artists as he was to his contemporaries. Inspired by Whistler’s tonal style and atmospheric urban subjects, Sickert experimented with how changing light affected the facades of famous buildings, and he pioneered new approaches to traditional subject matter, such as his unidealised nudes, which drew on the influences of artists such as Bonnard and Degas, paving the way for the treatment of the nude by later painters like Lucian Freud.

Sickert subsequently began to move away from Whistler’s approach to painting from nature with a wet-in-wet technique, and instead painted in the studio from sketches made in situ. He developed a love of the world of the British music hall as a source of inspiration, and became known for his portraits, domestic scenes from everyday life and landscapes of Dieppe and Venice. In his later years, he also relied increasingly on news photographs and popular culture for his sources of inspiration and to help him create his compelling narratives. This ground-breaking approach to the use of news photographs was also an important precursor to pop artists’ later 20th century use of popular culture media images as inspiration for their work.

Sickert was a founding member of the post-impressionist Camden Town Group, active from 1911 to 1913, and his contemporaries frequently met at his north London studio, inspired by his passion for painting life’s everyday gritty realities, which also influenced many later 20th-century British artists, including Francis Bacon.

In an accompanying article about the exhibition in Tate Etc, issue 54, six contemporary artists explain how Sickert’s work continues to inform and influence their work. To quote one of them, Andrew Cranston, a Glasgow-based artist: ‘Sickert is one of the great imagemakers and one of painting’s most distinctive colourists. I think of him, especially in his early work, as a sort of psychological impressionist with a feeling for the dark rather than the light – an inverted Claude Monet, and yet so much more than “just an eye”, as Monet was once described by Paul Cézanne. Sickert’s nocturnal, close-toned palette acknowledges the eye’s ability to adjust to low light, and to discern shape, forms and figures in the peripheral and hidden.’ Acknowledgements and endorsements such as these are further testament to how relevant Sickert remains to today’s painters and why this exhibition is such a must-see opportunity for all practising artists.

Walter Sickert is at Tate Britain from April 28 – September 18, 2022. See also pages 12–13