(Yep,
another art exhibiton reviewed after it closes!)
For
Foreign Shores
An
accessible destination even in Sickert's day, Dieppe was once a
fashionable resort – a mecca for holiday-makers and a haven for
expats. The artist first visited it as a child, made it his honeymoon
destination in 1885 and lived there from 1895. But more, the show
boldly claims that “it was in Dieppe that Sickert formulated some
of his most important painterly techniques and pictorial strategies”.
As if it was as much a rosebud to him as Tahiti was for Gauguin.
His
initial influence, however, was Whistler – to whom he was even
apprenticed. An artist who, in all honesty, I know even less than
usual about. The show cites 'La Plag, Dieppe' (c.
1885, below) as one of these early works. The sea, very often, is
simply a setting for a painting – a backdrop for the actual
subject, or at least we see human figures in interaction with it.
Check out for example Monet's 'Jardin a Sainte-Addresse'. Human figures fill the
foreground, the sea but one section of the perspective, and even then
is shown busy with boats. Sickert, we're told, mixed with the
fishermen and even learnt their local dialect. But the subject of his
sea paintings is very much the sea itself. All else arranges around
it, both boats and human figures pushed to its periphery. The
different shades of the sea become the work, in a painting only one
step away from a tone poem. (Our pal Wikipedia cites Whistler as a
proponent of Tonalism.)
The
story picks up as we're told “it was in Dieppe that Sickert became
affiliated with French Impressionism”. Which makes sense. At that
time Impressionist art didn't just feel frightfully modern and
continentally chic. Fidelity to subject, then a new notion for an
artist, tied their art to French soil. A French way of looking at
things combined with a way of looking at France.
Meeting
Degas in 1883, he fell under his influence and began to turn to
“direct painting” of more naturalistic settings. (Perhaps
remarkable in itself, for Degas was notorious for being truculent and
reclusive.) 'Dieppe Harbour' (c. 1902, below) is
perhaps a good example. The sea is no longer a central colour field
but a murky depth lying beneath a deep harbour wall - at the base of
a tall painting. It's no longer vivid and shimmering but built up by
thick dabs of grey and deep green. The whole painting
characteristically displays what the show calls a “low tonal key”.
His palette seems simultaneously deep and muted – frequently
returning to ruddy browns, burnt oranges and cold greys. Whistler's
disinterest in human figures is retained, however - we see the hotel
on harbour-front but the figures before it are dwarfed.
A Nation At Unease With Itself
Let's take the next two pictures together...
Let's take the next two pictures together...
'The
Fair At Night' (1902/03, below) has the recognised
Impressionist sense of verite. We're not outside the picture plane
dispassionately peering in, we're made to feel we're there on that
street with that bustling crowd. The awning and buildings are angled
and cropped, giving a sense of immediacy rather than a detached and
calm composition. And yet at the same time the crowd's collective
back is to us - we've no way of joining it. This is a paradox which
will come back again and again in Sickert's work.
While
'L'Hotel Royal Dieppe' (1894, up top) has the
strangest of colour schemes. Beneath an eerily pink-purple sky sits a
strangely green-hued hotel, in front of which flags hang rather than
flutter. The figures on the lawn, as a contrast to the barely
individuated crowd above, stand isolated. The two most foregrounded,
in nearly the only use of white in the painting, look almost ghostly.
This was painted before Sickert was living in Dieppe. But still it
has a haunting, end-of-season feeling. The viewer's mind travels from
the end of a day, the point where objects seem to radiate luminosity
rather than have solidity, to the end of the season. And quite
possibly the end of an era.
Its
worth considering how unlike the popular image of Impressionism these
works are. They're some way from the verdant gardens or promenading
dandies depicted in bright, vibrant colours. How much of this is
accurate and how much it's merely a popular stereotype will have to
wait for later. (And we should remember Degas did not necessarily fit
the model, to the point where he took umbrage at being described as
an Impressionist at all.) But its this popular view of the school
against which Sickert's works would have been seen. And had he stuck
to a more orthodox take, held to its themes and tone, he would have
most likely been a mere copyist. Perhaps an accomplished one, but
still a footnote in art history.
We
should remember Impressionism had arisen thirty years earlier, and
society had not stood still in that time. The show makes much of
Sickert's associating with 'decadent' artists, including during his
stay in Dieppe - such as Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde and Arthur
Symons. As curator Katy Norris puts it in the Pallant House magazine:
“His strange and unsettling imagery was paralleled in the work of
decadent writers and illustrators that typified the fatalistic
attitude of the fin de siecle”.
As
a catch-all name for a social trend rather than a movement which
emerged clutching a densely worded manifesto, the fin de siecle isn't
something that could be precisely defined. The Tate, however, call it “an umbrella term” which
“expresses an apocalyptic sense of the end of a phase of
civilisation.”
Society
had been transformed in the previous decades to a then-unparalleled
degree. It had been possible to witness and believe in uninterrupted
linear progress. Now people were starting to ask, perhaps too late,
where we were being taken. And many feared that social harmony had
been left behind, that we had made ourselves degenerate. A rootless
cosmopolitanism and a disconnected sense of self-absorption seemed to
go together in making up the modern mind, a sense of being everywhere
and noplace.
And
bohemian artists, with their introspection, with their dangerously
new ways of looking at things, were perhaps the lightning rod for
this trend. Wikipedia cites Munch's 'The Scream' as “a prominent cultural symbol of the fin
de siecle era”. Though there are two other (semi-silhouetted)
figures in his picture they're distant, removed from the screamer.
It's not a painting conveying what the screamer might be screaming
about, its subject is given in its title – the scream, the
subjective experience of the artist. Sickert takes up similar themes
but essentially faces the other way - he paints not the outsider
artist but society in the act of not cohering. To misquote John Major, a nation at unease with itself. So,with 'The
Fair At Night', we're there with the crowd on the street,
yet at the same time removed from them.
We
should remember that at this point, England still regarded
Impressionism as dangerously modern. (France in general was seen as
the centre of the wild and the scandalous.) So works such as these
would have seemed both commentaries on and examples of this
'decadence', records of their own condition. (Disclaimer: Sickert was
also exhibited in France at this time. Whether he'd have been seen in
a similar way in the home of Impressionism will have to stay an open
question.)
Back
to Churches
Perhaps
counter-intuitively for a 'decadent' artist one of Sickert's main
subjects was the churches of Dieppe. He returned to paint them again
and again, at different times of day and under different lighting
conditions. Once more this shows an Impressionist influence, for
Monet had repeatedly painted Rouen Cathedral in a similar fashion.
(Though Sickert's motives here may have been part financial, he
called Dieppe his “only goldmine”.)
In
'La Rue Piquet' (1900, above) the angle of the
view part-obscures the Church while the long shadows suggest a
particular time of day. The indistinct, suggested figures may well
have originated from sketch, where he started filling in the horse
and cart only to see them driven away. However his decision to then
keep them in (while moving them off-centre from the original drawing) gives the
work a ghostly sense, as if they are fleeting and impermanent against
the solid stone. The sky's confinement to a small snatch of grey at
the upper left adds to the architecture's imposing dominance.
In
'Rue de la Boucherie with St. Jacques' (c. 1902,
above) the colourful shop awnings suggest at human life. Yet the
square before them is devoid of activity, its literally in the shade
of the Church. The expanse of browns is as uninhabited, as much a
space in it's own right, as the sea in 'La Plag,
Dieppe'. In these works, it's the Impressionist sense of
verite which is both present and contrasted. The light and shadows
fix the works to a distinct time of day, yet there's also a sense of
timelessness. The result is quite Gothic. The churches are never
isolated from the town, as if they're being made the subject of
study. Yet at the same time they dominate the town, often towering
over it.
The show describes these works as “a conversation between
the mysterious and the commonplace”. Yet is it more of an awkward
silence? One way of reading them would be to see the human activity
as forever milling around the churches, but never finding their way
in. They’re almost akin to the way Paul Nash and others painted
megaliths, something irrefutably present on the landscape yet at the
same time inscrutably strange.
Not
all of Sickert's town studies are in this style, however. For example
'The Basket Shop, Rue St. Jean, Dieppe' (1911/2,
above) shows the Impressionist luminosity in full force, and is
almost a bookend to 'La Rue Piquet' - its street
running in the opposite direction. There's even another cart. And
this time the street does not run up against an imposing church but
opens to a bright skyscape, with a telegraph pole pointing upwards.
The feeling is one of forward motion, as if we're being pulled into
the painting., Human figures, however, are still de-emphasised.
Similarly, in 'Une Dieppoise' (1900) the titular
figure is foregrounded but then sheathed in shadow to the point she's
almost silhouetted.
New
Horizons
If
there was any doubt over the show's main theme, that Dieppe was
Sickert's muse, it's confirmed by the next section. For its not set
in Dieppe at all and is by some margin the weakest in the show. In
1912 he bought a house in Envermeu, some miles inland and took to
landscapes. Mostly these show how social subjects were his forte. The
best of them is 'Dieppe Races' (1920/6, below).
While
the horses are an active blur, one caught by the edge of the frame,
they're kept to the lower quarter of the composition. The audience
are not raked but placed directly behind them, visible only in the
gaps between the racers. Over half of the picture becomes graduations
of skyscape, similar to the seascape of 'La Plage'.
Nature takes the place of the churches in the earlier pictures, with
human activity a blurry and transient presence before it.
The
Twilight Life (Company Loves Misery)
Following
the death of his wife in 1920, Sickert was back in Dieppe. Though he
only spent a further two years in the town before returning to
London, its this brief period which may well yield the best material
in the show. The nearest comparison from the already-seen works would
be 'The Fair At Night'. However, Sickert retreated
not just to Dieppe but from expansive landscapes to interiors.
In
'Chez Varnet' (1925, above) the three foreground
figures are all in profile, the one furthest left unceremoniously
half-chopped by the edge of the frame. They look neither at us nor
one another but off, to something we can't see. While they look
present, there in front of us, its almost impossible to actually
focus on them. Sickert seems more interested in gesture and placement
than what they might actually look like.
Like
his mentor Degas, Sickert is less contrasting the mysterious with the
everyday than finding the mysterious in the everyday. He paints not
grand events but 'normal' scenes. Yet by virtue of them being
paintings, we expect his paintings to be explicable, poses and
objects arranged in such as way as to convey a meaning. When they
don't the normal becomes compelling inscrutable. Every now and again,
you may be in a pub or cafe and suddenly become fixated on people on
another table – trying to discern their relationships from what
little you see of their interactions. 'Chez Varnet'
gives this sense. The
exhibition notes find an insightful quote from Virginia Wolfe: “The figures are motionless, of course, but each has been seized in
a moment of crisis; it is difficult to look at them and not to invent
a plot, to hear what they are saying.”
The
bright light through the windows, however, makes this an unusual work
for the period. To the interior he normally adds the nocturnal. Take
for example the artificial light of Baccarat – The Fur
Cape' (1920, above). It's suggested Sickert was obliged not
to show the gamblers' faces by their unwillingness to be witnessed,
engaging as they were in so twilight an activity. If so, he made a
less a virtue of necessity than made it the subject of the painting.
With the great block of the back of the chair, the titular cape and
wide-brimmed hat, Sickert mixes verite with anonymity. While there's
little open space the image is less claustrophobic than entangled.
The lines of composition close in on one another, leaving no room for
the viewer. It's a table without a place for us.
'Au
Cafe Concert, Vernet's Dance Hall' (1920, above) does
centre it's composition on the singer, and shows her addressing the
crowd open-armed. But the line of tables that lead to her are
cluttered with the night's detritus to the point they make a
veritable obstacle course. Not least amongst this is the jutting
elbow of a slouched figure, who manages to have his back to us while
paying no attention to her. Night life is not only shown as something
seedy but strangely isolating, the promise to get out of yourself and
meet people unfulfilled, everyone trapped in their own reverie.
Wikipedia is unusually eloquent on the theme: “For
his music hall subjects, Sickert often chose complex and ambiguous
points of view, so that the spatial relationship between the
audience, performer and orchestra becomes confused, as figures
gesture into space and others are reflected in mirrors. The isolated
rhetorical gestures of singers and actors seem to reach out to no-one
in particular, and audience members are portrayed stretching and
peering to see things that lie beyond the visible space. This theme
of confused or failed communication between people appears frequently
in his art.” Again in the Pallant House magazine, Katy Norris
suggests mourning for his wife acting as Sickert's spur for these
works. There seems some evidence, however, the earliest of them were
planned before this.
'L'Amoire
A Glace' (1921/4, above) translates similar themes to a
domestic setting. The woman is placed beside, not in front of, a
mirror. Hands clasped in her lap, she looks almost like an attendant.
Her face is towards us but, almost in shadow, is indistinct and
barely delineated. This cropping allows the mirror to dominate the
frame, even suggests the room is arranged around it, yet neither do
we really see it reflect anything. After thousands of paintings of a
woman looking into a mirror, Sickert paints us a mirror.
We
saw earlier that a recurring theme, both of Sickert’s art and his
era, was self-absorption. And, in a scene boiled down to a woman and
a mirror, we have the theme in its purest form. But it’s a thwarted
self-absorption, someone not connecting even with themself. The
central yet removed mirror is an echo of the imposing church walls we
saw earlier. (And if there seems a detectable taste of misogyny to
all this women-and-mirrors business, then you ain't seen nothing yet.)
An
attentive disciple of Degas, Sickert was adept at something we don't
commonly associate with Impressionism - but probably should. He could
create apparently straightforward-looking works which have an
indefinable, beguiling quality to them. He took this further by
playing elements against one another. This gives many of this works
a strangely unsettling quality. We're invited into them at the same
time we can't feel at home within them. And this quality is
intensified by the difficulty the viewer has in figuring out just
how they feel that way. You’re not even
completely sure that something is wrong, you just
can’t shake the nagging sense that all might be not quite right.
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