Art
The Making of Images
By SIMON HODGSON IF even Catullus called Caesar great it was because the poet saw power personi- fied. And let us not concern ourselves with that othei- worldly 'real power' which is to do with pens being mightier than swords; simple power, over what- ever chosen set of circum- stances, people or materials, will suffice, and has one simple attribute, that it is easily recognisable when it is encountered. Painters have to be encountered to exist; there are no eminences grises of painting, and here greatness, or call it mastery, can soon be felt, if not approved. How then to class Sickert, who was born a hundred years ago, and to whom two London galleries are now devoting exhibitions? How complete was his power over his instru- ments of brush and pigment, pencil, pen and needle? His masters were Ingres, Delacroix, Couture and his father so far as painting was concerned; Whistler, Keene and again his father so far as ,his drawing and etchings went. Degas was a late-encountered master of a very dif- ferent, kind, and Whistler had very little effect on his painting. His own mature work, once he had come to terms with the Impressionist palette, remained,, much more than that of his French contemporaries, tied to the traditions of the mid-nineteenth century. He started painting 'colour in the shadows,' he worked increasingly in distinct areas of colour, but the canvases never sought to achieve the immediacy of a Monet or a Pissarro or a Sisley (the other English- man in the movement); they are paintings done indoors from sketches, notes and memory, owing Most to 'la belle pelt:lure' of the early-nineteenth- century French masters. He was closer, say, to Manct and Blanche than to those whom we now call impressionists for their rediscovery of inter- related pure colours, and the plein-air immediacy of their vision of nature. He was not, then, a real 'impressionist.'
In his drawings and etchings a further asser- tion may, I think, be made. Each stroke, of pencil or etcher's needle, in the more finished drawings and plates suggests a painter's brush stroke. Sickert thought always as a painter; and in much the same way—but there the similarity ends—van Gogh's drawings are the actual ground-plan for /he disposition and direction of his pigment on a canvas. Degas, so often called his master, differed from Sickert in that his mastery lay in drawing; and when Degas ventured beyond pastel into oil-paint his character becomes muffled and his talent is be- trayed by an unsympathetic medium. Leave the flateness of Degas's oils on one side, and com- pare the Frenchman's drawings with those of the Anglo-Dane. Their intentions are entirely different, not merely their personalities. Degas and Sickert were of the same traditional artistic background, but Degas had an intellect and an aristocratic (for want of a better word) disregard for any but the most absolute and untrammelled approach to drawing that Sickert, with his illustrator's eye, his more immediate sympathy to the more transitory associations of an object or a scene, and his love of the warmer and more sensual medium of oil-paint, lacked.
He was a painter, concerned with surface, colour, texture, the movement of the brush; illustration and revelation married in pigment. Degas's limits were even more strictly defined, and his mastery is greater, but Sickert's range has its own splendour, for he moved, like a great novelist, beyond the basic requirement of suf- ficient story to fit the perfectly conceived pattern or structure; he made the structure fit the sub- ject. It was this ability to make a moving image of the girl in the wretched bedroom, the brass bedstead, the couple at a table in a stuffy room in a suburban street that marks him. Lautrec was a Sunday journalist by comparison, for this is not reportage but the making of images— that is the rejection of scenes or subjects 'pre- created or predigested by other artists. Degas could deal with more commonplace currency only because his aims were so contained and his self-criticism so glacial. Sickert's knowledge of his chosen subjects was personal and deep—he had been poor, but also he had chosen his friends, and his quarters among them—but his greatness lay, as much as in his mastery of his materials, in the kind of poetry with which he endowed his subjects while all the time reveal- ing his knowledge of them. That this poetry, and he is in many ways the most sentimental of English painters, is convincing and also moving adds a dimension to his character, and, since it is always expressed within the painterly plan of a work, to his quality as an artist.
An artist, then, concerned with illustrating, with anecdote; and temperamentally drawn to oil-paint as his means of expression, a medium in which his mastery, no less, was and is most evident; and an artist above all who married these two preoccupations successfully—high praise, perhaps the highest. In this, I think it is true, his training in, and concern for, that par- ticular European tradition and discipline which have too briefly outlined played an enormous part. It may be a tiresome and reactionary sug- gestion, but it seems clear that his strength lay in his adaptation of methods known and absorbed, in his approach to new territory from the terra firma of an old expertise, in his ability to change without despising or renouncing wholesale those artistic forebears whose example both limited and strengthened him.
I hope to add to these sketchy notes on a great painter when the Tate Memorial Exhibition opens. In the meantime the exhibition of Mintchine's works at the new galleries of Messrs. McRoberts and Tunnard shows us a less evi- dently tormented Russian than his near- contemporary and friend Soutine, but one who, despite his lively and attractive palette, was nevertheless a melancholy and withdrawn man. THE SPECTATOR, APRIL I. 196° There is one picture here of an elderly gardener that someone should buy for the nation. Under the ebullience of his surfaces Mintchine has 3 power, and an awareness of the shortness of lif and of the fleeting abundance of even the melt riotous summer that are not easily ignored.
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