WALTER SICKERT | NUDE NOT NAKED
Walter Sickert has been described as the first British Modernist, and this oil on canvas, The Painter and His Model, courtesy of Christopher Kingzett, is a good example of the experimental nature of his work in the early Edwardian period.
Walter Sickert, RA (1860-1942) The Painter and His Model Canvas, 24 ¼ x 20 in (62 x 51 cm), courtesy of Christopher Kingzett
Sickert, of course, divided his time between England and France, and, having been heavily influenced by the likes of Whistler and Degas, was sickened by the stale, unimaginative nature of the British art scene of that era, and particularly his compatriot artists’ idealised treatment of ‘the Nude’ (his upper-case).
"The modern flood of representations of vacuous images dignified by the name of the Nude represents an artistic and intellectual bankruptcy", he wrote, in a seminal article entitled The naked and the Nude, for New Age in July 1910.
In c1902 he had started painting a series of works which sought to reinvent the tradition, by depicting raw, unsentimental portraits of sitters (often prostitutes) in seedy, half-lit lodging rooms, notably in Camden Town. They were more valued by French critics than their English counterparts: one Telegraph journalist described them as ‘musty, flabby realities’.
The Painter and his Model was composed in Paris in 1907, during a trip much delayed by his perfectionist obsession with a series of nudes he had been painting in London. He had long been experimenting with using reflections to affect spatial distortion in his composition, and this is one of three canvases of that period in which he juxtaposed a naked woman (his sitter, or ‘muse’) with a clothed man (presumably himself).
It is a challenging painting for a modern viewer to appreciate, and would have been even more so for contemporaries. In her entry for the Walter Sickert Tate Exhibition Catalogue (2022), Dr Wendy Baron describes this series of paintings as ‘graded pictorial experiments designed to achieve the disintegration of form.’ ‘Their incoherence’, she continues, ‘anticipates developments in British post-war painting by some 70 years’.
Christopher Kingzett will show The Painter and his Model at Stand 10 of the Fair, alongside other works by Sickert, Peter Blake, Patrick Heron, Paul Nash, Alan Reynolds, Walter Sickert, Graham Sutherland and Keith Vaughan. Try not to miss the major retrospective Walter Sickert, on at Tate Britain until September 18.