BOOKS

Knowledge of two lifetimes

Bevis Hillier

Petro Torrigiano, who modelled the bust of Henry VII for Westminster Abbey, was expelled from his native Florence for breaking Michelangelo's nose. Artists' quarrels seldom get that rough; the most notorious non-violent rivalry was between the freezingly classical Ingres and the riotously romantic Delacroix. Except for that pair it would be hard to find two artists, in one age, more poles apart than J. McNeill Whistler and William Morris art for art's sake and art for politics' sake. Morris in his blue serge suit, a man's man, uncouth and unkempt, trying to recreate mediaeval Olde England in art and craft. Quick-witted Whistler, the monocled Yankee doodle dandy and ladies' man squibs in speech and fireworks in paint. Morris faithful to the anecdotal of courtly love-poems and Icelandic sagas; Whistler out to jettison what he called the 'clap-trap' of historicism and the anecdotal in art. No wonder John Ruskin was Morris's friend and Whistler's foe.

Yet the two artists had things in common. They were born in the same year, 1834. Their families were of the affluent middle class. Both rebelled against their establishment schooling, Morris at Marl- borough, Whistler at West Point. Both were interior decorators with an eye for the tout ensemble. Both were friends of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Both had links with the Greek community in London and flirted with Greek consuls' daughters. Both set up shops in the West End of London Morris & Company and Whistler's Compa- ny of the Butterfly. (Whistler's venture failed.) Both were wickedly caricatured by Max Beerbohm.

Each of them, not long after his death, was celebrated in a monumental biography, Morris by J. W. Mackail, Whistler by his hero-worshippers Joseph and Elizabeth Pennell. Each figures in books by that marvellous populariser, William Gaunt Morris in The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy (also published as The Pre-Raphaelite Dream, no doubt on the whim of some smart-ass publisher who thought the sweetened title would sell better in America), Whistler in The Aesthetic Adventure — books which are still the introductions to those two over- lapping coteries. Both artists have had good middleweight biographies devoted to them, such as Jack Lindsay's William Morris and James Laver's Whistler. And both have now been given the works, at £25 a go. But these two antithetical artists share something more significant than these arbi- trary links. Fiona MacCarthy hints at it in the subtitle to her Morris biography: 'A Life for Our Time'. Scrabbling hands reach back from the present to claim both men as heresiarchs and as the pioneers of modern movements. Morris is seen as the founder of the arts and crafts movement which in turn inspired the Bauhaus which contribut- ed to the International Style in architec- ture. He was also in at the beginning of British socialism. Whistler, by his ditching of anecdotal 'clap-trap', is hailed as the pioneer of modern art. The Sunday Times, previewing the current Tate Gallery exhibi- tion of Whistler, reproduced the portrait of his mother on the cover of its 'Culture' supplement on 2 October, with the unequivocal cover-line, `WHERE MODERN ART BEGAN'. The modern movement in architecture led to 'egg-box' tower blocks of the 1960s. Modern art led to Rothko's doltish rectangles of tinted nothingness. If you were able to set Morris and Whistler down in front of these supposed outcomes of their pioneering, both men would have something pretty trenchant to say — espe- cially Whistler. And Morris, who despised the parliamentary system, would probably feel more at home with Class War than with Tony Blair's Labour Party.

It is egotistical to assess artists' merits by what they mean to the present age: to do so is to descend to the level of the man who remarked, 'Shakespeare says, and I must say I agree with him . . When Michael Parkinson asked John Betjeman, `Are your poems relevant, do you think?' the laureate replied, 'No — thank God.' The greatness of Morris and Whistler does not depend on pats on the back from the present. Both set standards that no one today comes close to meeting. Both were polymaths, not dilettantes, with a phenom- enal range of skills. Morris was a poet (he was seriously considered to succeed Tennyson as Laureate); a painter; a design- er of genius; a craftsman in stained glass, dyeing, tapestry; a calligrapher and illumi- nator; a printer of books; a conservationist; an anti-pollution environmentalist; and a formidable political activist. Whistler was the finest etcher since Rembrandt; an experimental painter whose best effects are sublime; a revolutionary interior designer; a theorist in aesthetics and a spirited polemicist, a wit who could beat Wilde to the draw.

Fiona MacCarthy is the ideal biographer for Morris. Winston Churchill wrote, of the `walking with destiny' moment when he assumed conduct of Britain's role in the second world war, that he felt his whole life had been but a preparation for that hour. You could say the same of MacCarthy and the task she set herself. She was formerly Design Correspondent of The Guardian, a very Morrisian newspaper. Since 1972, when she published All Things Bright and Beautiful, a study of design in Britain since 1830 (already claiming Morris as the 'cen- tral figure' in the arts and crafts move- ment), she has put herself through a commando course of research into the his- tory of British design and has written sever- al more books on the subject. The most recent, a biography of Eric Gill — in many ways a Morris disciple — was a succes de scandale, detailing as it did his unorthodox sex-life, including congress with dogs. (An artist who didn't quite know where to draw the line?) Though she is superbly qualified to write on Morris the artist-craftsman, and does so with distinction and without art-history jargon, she is equally interested in Morris the man. Anyone delving into Morris's life in search of juicy sex scandals would find slim pickings. MacCarthy finds him 'reti- cent', with a 'huge bashfulness', happiest in robust male groups with such friends as (Sir) Edward Burne-Jones, the architect Philip Webb and 'Crom' Price, immor- talised as the headmaster in Kipling's Stalky & Co. She is inclined to credit a friend's observation that Morris 'talked to women in exactly the same manner as he addressed a journeyman carpenter'. (Sup- port for this comes from a housekeeper who said to Burne-Jones, 'I shouldn't think Mr Morris knew much about women, sir,' adding, 'he is such a bear with them.') But Morris's wife Jane, an Oxford stablehand's daughter, obliges by having affairs with Rossetti — who painted luscious portraits of her and wrote luscious poems to her and with the randy explorer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.

Why was Morris so complaisant? Masochism, MacCarthy thinks. On the basis of his fondness for Sidonia the Sorcer- ess, a 'perversely erotic witch hunt novel' translated from the German by Oscar Wilde's mother, she deduces: '[Morris] felt the allure of the lady with the whiplash, a masochistic urge towards abasement and defilement.' Oddly enough, Sidonia the Sorceress comes into the Whistler story too. Ronald Anderson and Anne Koval think the book may have been an influence on Whistler's painting, 'The White Girl', rejected by the Royal Academy in 1862.

MacCarthy is scrupulous in exposing Morris's weaknesses as well as extolling his strengths. Some of his poems are fit for The Stuffed Owl book of bad verse. He was (as he eventually recognised) no painter. He had fallen for Rossetti's glib notion that the creative springs of poetry and art are the same. Rossetti, using the pet name favoured by Morris's friends, wrote a rhyme about his duffness as a draughts- man:

Poor Topsy has gone to make a sketch of Miss Lipscombe But he can't draw the head, and don't know where the hips come.

But Morris was the most inspired pattern- maker. Partly this skill came from the train- ing he had given himself, studying the floral-whorl borders of mediaeval illumina- tion at the Bodleian Library and in the British Museum. Perhaps, too, it mirrored his socialist theories of parts fitting into the whole with no dominant 'leader'. Mac- Carthy pours some cold water on the theo- ry, given currency by Nikolaus Pevsner, that the Bauhaus was in direct descent from Morris. And in his socialism she finds more in common with Disraeli's Young England movement than with Marx and Engels.

In 1886 Funny Folks magazine printed a cartoon of Morris having his boots blacked by a policeman — the implication was that Morris, when charged with hitting a police- man, had been treated by the magistrate much more leniently than the workers he supported. In the drawing Morris is hold- ing a banner inscribed 'The Earthly Para- dox' (a pun, of course, on his poem The Earthly Paradise). MacCarthy unflinchingly confronts this and the other paradoxes in Morris's life. The central dilemma was that he wanted to make cheap, well-designed things for the working class, but his perfec- tionism meant only the well-off could afford his goods. The working man expect- ed to pay is 6d for a chair; Morris's cost 7s. He was regarded as a kindly boss, but still the conditions of his workers were not far short of sweated labour. When he took over Merton Abbey in Surrey as a weaving shop, his madder dye polluted the River Wandle. When one of his customers, Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell, asked why he was stamping and storming through the rooms he had been called in to advise on, Morris turned on him 'like a wild animal', saying, `It is only that I spend my life ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich.'

The book reads as a gripping story. Fiona MacCarthy cares about Morris and makes you care too. The writing is fluent where it needs to be and crisp where it needs to be. She constantly gets under the surface of things by asking awkward questions. (Did Morris's workers become socialists because they believed in the movement, or just to curry favour with their boss?) The narrative is enlivened by her wit. Morris has been 'appropriated by the Greens'; Charlotte Yonge's novel The Heir of Redclyffe was 'a surplice-ripper'; Morris's illuminated pages are 'like demented wallpaper'; when he writes his- torical novels full of `sooths' and 'quoths' he is 'writing in fancy dress'. But could she please rid herself of the Guardianesque euphemism 'terminally (= 'dying')?

Anderson's and Koval's book on Whistler has not quite the depth of Mac- Carthy's book; few biographies have. The authors are professional art historians, so we have to put up with some of the dreary argot of that discipline: . . there are only three paintings which may have come from No, my little sexpot, "harassment" has one r and two s's. ' this period, and two of them contain stylis- tic inconsistencies which present problems of absolute authentification.' But apart from these passages and the endless game of who-influenced-whom, this is an enjoy- able read and the most objective study of Whistler so far. His own wit, often in the Sydney Smith class, is ever on parade. (Of his having been kicked out of West Point for failing a chemistry exam: 'If silicon had been a gas, I would have been a general.') Anderson and Koval explode the myth, retailed by the Pennells, that Whistler was an American genius who came from nowhere to put European art to rights. They are interested in Whistler the man as well as the artist, giving new details of his politically dangerous friendship with the Irish activist John O'Leary and suggesting that awareness of negro blood in his family may have made Whistler (by overcompen- sation) specially pro-Confederate in the American Civil War.

What of Whistler the progenitor of mod- ern art? The authors quote an 1881 critique of his work by the French writer Theodore Duret:

In his Nocturnes . . . Mr Whistler has . . . arrived at the outermost margins of for- malised painting. One step more and there would be nothing on canvas except a form- less blob, incapable of imparting anything to the eye and mind.

Anderson and Koval comment on this one is not sure whether with naive approval or ironic disapproval — 'One step further and Duret would have stumbled into the abstract art of the 20th century.' Quite so!

At times the authors' research lets them down. Although they mention the art dealer Murray Marks, they show no sign of having read the book on him by C. C. Williamson, which would have given more body to their account of Whistler's unauthorised decoration of the Peacock Room and would have put them on to the illustrations he did for the Chinese porce- lain catalogue of the surgeon Sir Henry Thompson. G. A. Storey is confused with Waldo Story.

Morris and Whistler met at least once, as MacCarthy records but Anderson and Koval do not record. In 1863 the two men were both at a party at Ford Madox Brown's house in Kentish Town to wel- come the French artist Alphonse Legros to London. Swinburne and Christina Rossetti were also there. Georgiana Burne-Jones, paraphrased by MacCarthy, described Whistler at this event, 'with drooping black hair and angry eye-glass looking ten times more like a Frenchman than Legros'. Mac- Carthy adds:

Whistler, in his diary, provides a more mali- cious vignette of Rossetti and Mrs Morris at one of the Browns' parties 'sitting side by side, being worshipped in an inner room'. You can't imagine Morris sniggering like that if Whistler had been cuckolded. Whistler was by streets the better painter; but Morris was by streets the better man.