I always mix up Sickert, Whistler and Singer Sargent. Is it the period, the styles, the two-syllable names or what? I’ve no idea, but in an attempt to sort myself out I went along to the current Walter Sickert exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.
Five stars from The Telegraph. “The Walker’s terrific exhibition goes to the jugular of Sickert's tense and stressful art” roars the Guardian. You can’t blame the gallery for publicising good reviews but it does seem to raise the stakes for a casual viewer like me.
It is a good exhibition too. It fills four or five gallery rooms and there must be fifty or so works on display – perhaps more, I didn’t count - along with background material and historical and biographical detail. It took me about 90 minutes to get around the whole thing. The curation is mercifully free of the current tendency to tell you what to think but supplies facts and ideas which help you get to grips with what you are looking at. And I achieved my purpose because I now have a clearer impression of Sickert’s life and work.
I found the paintings very sombre – even when depicting supposedly lighthearted subjects such as music hall scenes. The colours are muted, details indistinct, outlines often unclear and I found myself peering quite often. It was a little like looking at underexposed photographs. At one point he was commissioned to paint six views of Dieppe for display in a hotel in the town. All six were rejected. Here is one above right.
You can see why it didn’t make the cut, I think. A hotel owner would be wanting to promote his town but this is a dark picture which hardly entices visitors. The others were similar. What was Walter thinking of?
So you wouldn’t really be looking to Sickert to cheer you up, I think. And I have to admit that I find oil painting sometimes to be a little heavy going, almost ponderous. My eye seems reluctant to look. Those great big ornate, gilded frames don’t help either. Yet I love the sketches that precede the works. I could look at them all day.
Here is a sketch and then the final painting.
Baccarat - The Fur Cape. 1920.
I find the sketch fresh and light. It leaves me speculating in a way that the painting does not. It’s like radio to television.
Having finished with the exhibition I wandered off to look around the gallery and found a roomful of British art mostly from the first half of the 20th century. It was fantastic. I felt that I was walking on air. Apart from Lowery and Paul Nash I had never heard of the artists shown there: painters, sculptors, ceramicists. Perhaps that absence of expectation is important. You just wander in and there it is. There was even a Rodin. I am not sure what he was doing in a room devoted to British art but I could have walked around that sculpture all afternoon watching the light play on it. The room really lifted me up.