Sickert still shocks, but was he really a radical Victorian?
Exhibition Walter Sickert Tate Britain, London SW1 ★★★
On a visit to Venice in 1901, the British painter Walter Sickert dubbed the city “Kilburn-inthe-sea”. It was an observation that, in many ways, summed up his whole outlook on life. Not even La Serenissima could inspire a sense of idealism in him. There wasn’t a romantic bone in his body.
What Sickert brought to British art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a belief that the muck and stuff of contemporary urban life was worth attention. A new retrospective at Tate Britain – Sickert’s first in London for three decades – makes the case for what a radical figure he was.
Certainly, in his devastating series of nudes, known as the Camden Town Murder paintings (1907-9), there’s none of the drawing-room decorum or stifling good taste we associate with the Edwardians. The series takes its title from the real-life killing of a prostitute in her lodgings in (theninsalubrious) Camden. The case – which was never solved – attracted considerable media attention, as well as Sickert’s.
In one work, L’affaire de Camden Town, a fully-clothed man stands beside an iron-frame bed and looks menacingly down at a naked woman lying on it. The setting is a cramped, dimly lit interior. Passages of vigorous brushwork around the woman’s body imply the violence about to be meted out to her. Sickert places us at the end of the bed, with a view leading directly to her genitalia. The series is so psychologically tense it makes for tough viewing, even though not a single weapon or act of physical harm is depicted.
The artist had actually moved to Camden in 1905 – after several years based in France – apparently choosing that area over fancier ones because he wanted to witness life as ordinary people lived it. One of his mentors was Edgar Degas, whose influence showed itself in many ways, including the view that day-to-day business was a proper subject for art.
Writing in 1905, the eminent French critic Louis Vauxcelles referred to Sickert as “a man… of the evening when the curtains intercept all light”. He meant it as a compliment, praising a dingy, suffocating quality in the artist’s work – however, it also points to a big problem. Sickert’s palette was murky and muddy, with countless types of brown but little in the way of colour. Which might be fine, even captivating, in a modestly sized show, but isn’t suited to a retrospective of 150 works. Going from room to room becomes a trudge. There’s not a single picture to put a spring in the step – Sickert was the duke of darkness.
The curators also fail to address a longstanding paradox. Before making it in art, Sickert was a keen, if not hugely successful, actor. Throughout his life, he loved dressing up and assuming different identities: the exhibition’s first room features 10 self-portraits of him doing just that. (One identity he assumed, albeit never pictorially, was that of Jack the Ripper: a figure who certain crackpots over the years have even claimed was Sickert himself.)
The paradox, then, is how the purveyor of stark documentary realism could at the same time embrace such dashingly fictitious theatrics. Sickert’s character, like his art, is rather hard to make out – and this frustrating show is proof.
Until Sept 18. Tickets: 020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk