Sickert: From Music Hall to Pop Pioneer

Walter Sickert -- the gloomiest, murkiest of English artists? We've definitely been a little too harsh. 

There's certainly a fair bit of gloom and murk in the big Walter Sickert exhibition at Tate Britain, but there's a lot that's much lighter and full of entertainment. From Sickert's inventive music-hall scenes, this fascinating show takes you through luminous townscapes and on to a revelatory final room that shows the painter in his later years as an unwitting pre-war pioneer of Pop Art. 

And let's hear it for the Tate for once; we've sometimes found the way they curate their exhibitions infuriating -- the Hogarth and Europe show this past winter was in thrall to political correctness -- but this one is beautifully and logically put together; a straightforward retrospective, and all the better for it. 

The first two rooms of the eight in the exhibition look at Sickert's self-portraits and his apprenticeship years in the 1880s (his early stuff, under the influence of Whistler, really is murky), but it's in the third room, devoted to the music hall, that things really start to capture the audience. We began to see pictures that we hadn't seen before, things about Sickert that we hadn't appreciated. Sickert was an actor prior to becoming a painter and he was fascinated by the music hall. He visited almost every night, and his paintings sought out unusual viewpoints that captured the colour and vibrancy of this very Victorian and Edwardian form of popular entertainment. Edgar Degas provided significant impulses for Sickert's development in this genre.  

What a striking and initially puzzling painting The P.S. Wings in the O.P. Mirror is. The audience is at the front looking to the right; the performer in the red dress (and what a red it is) appears to be behind them, looking away from them. 

The reason for this is that Sickert's remarkable composition shows us the Prompt Side (stage left) as reflected in the mirror on the Opposite Prompt (stage right). Viewing the painting, we can see the bottom of the gilt frame of the mirror behind the audience, but it's quite a complicated illusion for our brains to process. Very clever indeed. 

Sickert had also used a mirror to frame the action in an earlier piece of theatrical magic; here we see a reflection of the singer Dot Hetherington performing at the Bedford Music Hall in Camden in north London. 

She's singing The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery (The boy I love is looking down at me/There he is, can't you see, waving his handkerchief).   

And The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery was an early title for the next picture, painted about six years later, and the first by Sickert to concentrate on the music-hall audience rather than the action on stage. It doesn't look like any of them have got their hanky out to wave back at Dot, or whoever else was singing, but they're all gripped by what's happening down below in the spotlight.  

Sickert's eye, though, is drawn not just to the audience members but to the wealth of decorative detail in the auditorium, partially displayed in yet another mirror on the left. 

The first room is devoted to self-portraits, but the painting that really caught our eye here is something a bit more genre-busting, a cross between a townscape and a narrative painting. It's also an early introduction to Sickert's late-period work, which is often much lighter in tone. 

The Front at Hove is the main title of this painting, but the subtitle is Turpe Senex Miles Turpe Senilis Amor, Latin for "an old soldier is a wretched thing, so also is senile love." The man in the bowler hat resembles contemporary photographs of Sickert, apparently trying to chat up the young lady in the red hat. Adelaide Crescent in Hove on England's south coast had been fashionable, but by the 1930s was rather dilapidated. A bit like Sickert perhaps, then aged about 70. We really liked the looseness of the painting here, the lightness and colour, the cropping of the image, and the unexpected humour. 

There are some terrific townscapes in this show, particularly of Dieppe on the Normandy coast, a favourite Sickert haunt (we liked a wonderful snapshot canvas of bathers on the beach there, as well), and of Venice. 

And what about this incredible light-filled picture? The subject is a drapers' shop on London's City Road, close to Old Street station. It's evening, and the street is almost deserted, but the store windows are brilliantly illuminated, and at street level two window-shoppers are admiring a display of hats -- Easter bonnets to be precise. A painting with a theatrical look, though in a completely different way. 

Among Sickert's best-known works are his nudes -- far from idealised and inspired by those of French painters such as Degas and Pierre Bonnard. Often fairly explicit, and posed and painted in dingy rooms in Camden Town, such pictures were well received when Sickert showed them in Paris; British critics, though, found them sordid. 

Most notorious are a group of paintings known as the Camden Town Murder series, depicting clothed men and naked women in ambiguous situations. The unsolved killing of Emily Dimmock, a part-time prostitute, in Camden Town in 1907 was one of the most sensational crimes of the era, and Sickert took advantage of the huge attention it received by giving some of his paintings titles that alluded to it, such as The Camden Town Murder, or What Shall We Do for the Rent? which depicts a man sitting at the end of a bed, apparently wringing his hands, his head bowed, alongside a naked woman, her face turned away, asleep.... or dead?

Sickert's paintings have in turn influenced later British painters such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. However, we found this section one of the less fascinating parts of the show, along with a room devoted to Sickert's narrative paintings, which failed to pique our interest too much, though it does include Ennui, perhaps his most recognisable work, another of those ambiguous pictures of his with a man and a woman apparently trapped together in a small room.  

It's in the final section of this exhibition that things take a really surprising turn. Sickert's late work continued to be inspired to a large extent by popular culture, with the cinema starting to play a big role, and by photography, which was replacing inches of wordy text to bring to life current events in newspaper coverage. 

Sickert was fascinated by the way black-and-white photos flattened perspectives and created stark contrasts in tone, as well as how news snapshots captured the moment. If you're coming to these pictures for the first time, as we were, it's remarkable how they anticipate the Pop Art of three decades later. 

Take Sickert's images of royalty, for example, which drew criticism for their lack of formality. This 1935 painting of King George V and Queen Mary is taken from a press photograph of the royal couple, with the queen's face cropped out by the frame of their carriage. 

It brought to mind one of the most famed of Pop Artworks, Richard Hamilton's Swingeing London '67, with Rolling Stone Mick Jagger, facing drugs charges, caught on film through the windows of a police van.  

Sickert reworked another press photograph of George's successor, Edward VIII, just weeks into his short reign in 1936. 

The snapshot of the king arriving at a church service catches him in a somewhat ungainly posture, with his sideways glance embodying a perhaps prescient air of uncertainty and his bearskin hat seemingly held protectively in front of him. Don't miss the newspaper cuttings (in a display case) about the photographer complaining Sickert hadn't paid him for reusing his shot....

It's not all royalty by any means -- there are movie stars, the arrival in Britain of the pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart and The Miner, a quite stunning reworking of a newspaper shot of a miner embracing his wife on his return from a sit-in strike down the pit. 

We really weren't expecting to enjoy this show this much. Thoroughly recommended. 

Practicalities

Walter Sickert is on at Tate Britain in London until September 18. and is open daily from 1000 to 1800. Full-price tickets cost £18 and are available online here; online booking is recommended, but the show was relatively empty when we visited, admittedly on a rather hot midweek afternoon. We spent a good 2 1/2 hours in the exhibition. The nearest London Underground station is Pimlico on the Victoria Line, about five minutes' walk away.

The show moves on to the Petit Palais in Paris from October 14 to January 29. 

Images

Walter Sickert, The P.S. Wings in the O.P. Mirror, c. 1888-89. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen
Walter Sickert, Little Dot Hetherington at the Bedford Music Hall, 1888-89, Private collection. Photo: James Mann
Walter Sickert, Gallery of the Old Bedford, 1894-95, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Walter Sickert, The Front at Hove (Turpe Senex Miles Turpe Senilis Amor), 1930, Tate

Walter Sickert, Easter, c. 1928. © National Museums NI, Ulster Museum Collection
Walter Sickert, King George V and Queen Mary, 1935, Private collection
Walter Sickert, HM King Edward VIII, 1936, Private collection