A fascinating exhibition in Belfast brings together the bequest of one of painter Walter Sickert's main models, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic.
In January 1923 Walter Sickert went to a public lecture by the art critic, Roger Fry. Sickert is generally regarded as having been in a state of prolonged depression at the time, following the death of his second wife, Christine, about a year and a half previously.
Selling tickets for the lecture was a young artist, Cicely Hey. Hey was quite striking-looking, though no beauty in any conventional sense of the term. The writer, Frances Partridge, described her in a letter as "small and slender in every part, like a toy made carefully out of wires and a little wool . . . a little pale face and round eyes, rather elfin or pixie-like". In any case, something about her appealed immediately to Sickert. According to her account, he joked a bit with her, then asked her to sit for him, and she agreed.
Thereafter, he made some fine portrait studies, including one extraordinary painting that could by no means be termed flattering. More to the point, they became unlikely friends. She was engaged to and subsequently married RR Tatlock, a critic and editor of the Burlington Magazine. Sickert himself married another painter, Therese Lessore, in 1926.
Yet, as Alistair Smith writes in the catalogue of Walter Sickert: Drawing is the Thing, an exhibition now showing at the Ulster Museum, it was Cicely Hey who somehow dragged Sickert out of the doldrums and got him working enthusiastically again. As she later recalled, having read accounts of the dispirited painter hiding away from the world in a cold, comfortless room: "At the time . . . I was sitting inside in a comfortable armchair beside a roaring fire . . . my sides aching with laughter."
In fact, it was in many respects Hey who prompted the organisation of the current exhibition. Sickert gave her a portfolio of works for which she was the subject, and Hey decided as early as 1948 that she was going to leave these works to the Whitworth and Manchester art galleries. On her death in 1980, the works on paper went to the former and the paintings to the latter. Her legacy impressively augmented the Whitworth's already formidable Sickert collection of works on paper.
There is an obvious logic to reuniting the Hey bequest in one exhibition, and the Whitworth could have been lazy about it, mounting a worthwhile but modest project without too much trouble. Instead, with the support of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, it's put together a terrific, wide-ranging show that explores in depth Sickert's use of drawing for itself, drawing in relation to print-making, and drawing as preparation for painting, also bringing in the question of his use of photographic sources. It has borrowed several versions of his best-known painting, Ennui, including the definitive one from the Tate Gallery, together with various other relevant canvases.
Unfortunately, Sickert's name most recently registered in public consciousness when the thriller writer, Patricia Cornwell, wrote a book in which she claimed to offer convincing evidence that he was the serial killer, Jack the Ripper. She is not the first person to link the painter with the Ripper killings. Sickert revelled in the darker side of things, looking to streetlife for his subject matter.
"Taste is the death of a painter," he wrote. "The plastic arts are gross arts dealing joyously with gross material facts."
That he famously painted the aftermath of a killing in The Camden Town Murder has been held against him. Yet any close reading of Cornwell's book makes it clear that the case against him is, to put it mildly, extremely tenuous.
EARLY IN HIS career as an artist, having worked as Whistler's assistant, he went on to befriend the notoriously prickly Edgar Degas. Whistler and (particularly) Degas were, in essence, the competition. We can see in Sickert's liking for oblique, allusive subjects and abrupt, snapshot compositions an emulation of Degas, and perhaps envy as well, because he never quite managed Degas's exceptional level of draughtsmanship and picture-making. His own paintings, relatively stilted by comparison, often thickly textured and incredibly dark, also recall Vuillard. He started out as an actor and had a theatrical streak, loving performance, and he produced brilliant, vivid evocations of the music hall, an area well represented in the show.
By following the progress of a work from initial sketches, perhaps just thumbnails, to finished canvases, we can see that drawing was, indeed, the thing. For Sickert, it was a fast, opportunistic process. He had a specific and consistent procedure, which he taught to his students: "First your tentative line, then your light and shade, and then your definitive line."
That very first, fleeting impression, which might be no more than an abstract-seeming flourish, is indispensable. It may be significantly corrected by the second and third stages of the process, but it retains an essential truth and vitality.
THE SPONTANEOUS ACHIEVEMENT of a viable drawing is a prize that, once won, has to be carefully preserved. Sickert followed tried and trusted traditional methods by meticulously squaring up his drawings for accurate enlargement and further development on paper or canvas. Of course, he does introduce changes. He tries out several variations of a composition, for example, or makes minute adjustments of line or pattern, but at the same time he remains extremely faithful to the initial kernel of any given image.
Oddly enough, he was happy to work from literal given images, in the form of newspaper photographs. He was one of the first painters to admit to using photographic sources. As Rebecca Daniels points out in her richly informative catalogue essay, at the same time he felt free to castigate other artists for using photographs as sources. Yet he was right. He felt that photography brought its own valuable contribution to the business of making pictures. In other words, something new should come out of the meeting of painting and photography, and photogrpahy should not be merely used as a surreptitious means to conventional pictorial ends.
Alas, the later works in the exhibition, made when he had given up drawing - perhaps, Hey suggested, because his sight was failing - are relatively weak, being derivative of photographs in an inferior way. Even so, it's interesting to see them and they don't take away from what is an outstanding and fascinating exhibition.
Walter Sickert: Drawing is the Thing is at the Ulster Museum until Jun 5 (048-90383000)