Talent to amuse
Laura Gascoigne
Rex Whistler: The Triumph of Fancy Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, until 3 September The restaurant at Tate Britain is famous for two things — its wine list and its mural. Hamish Anderson, compiler of the former, began with the advantage of a famous cellar; Rex Whistler, creator of the latter, began with the blank walls of a dingy basement previously referred to as a ‘dungeon’.
Whistler was only 20 and still a student at the Slade when he won the restaurant commission in 1926. His rare gifts of draughtsmanship and imagination had persuaded Henry Tonks he was the man for the job, and the Professor’s faith in his favourite pupil was rewarded. In place of the usual trompe l’oeil panels, Whistler came up with an ambitious, continuous scheme: the travels of a party of epicures ‘In Pursuit of Rare Meats’ through afantasy landscape dotted with architectural capriccios. On the restaurant’s reopening, the press pronounced it ‘the Most Amusing Room in Europe’. ‘If only we can save him from the Pit,’ sighed Tonks, ‘because directly he is launched he will be an amazing success.’ If Whistler needed saving, it was not from the pit of artistic fashion that awaits so many brilliant art school graduates his love of narrative and rococo decoration was not designed to appeal to fashionable critics. ‘A storytelling picture,’ sniffed Virginia Woolf, ‘is as pathetic and ludicrous as a trick played by a dog.’ No, the pit awaiting Whistler was a well-lined one, a long way from the boho funk of the Fitzroy Tavern. His decorative genius won him an immediate and loyal following among the cultivated aristocracy, who commissioned his murals, admired his stage designs and subscribed to the expensive limited-edition books he illustrated so inventively. Instead of entering his natural milieu of Young British Artists, Whistler was co-opted into a smart circle of Bright Young Things, described by Lytton Strachey as ‘perfectly divine — strange creatures with just a few feathers where their brains ought to be’.
As a result, very little of his work gained general currency. His first major exhibition was held at Brighton Museum and the V&A in 1960, 16 years after his tragically early death, and Brighton is now the scene of a new retrospective, Rex Whistler: The Triumph of Fancy, covering his 20-year career as a muralist, illustrator, theatrical designer and painter. The Brighton connection is a poignant one, for it was here that the 39year-old Whistler painted his last picture before embarking for Normandy in 1944. ‘Allegory: HRH The Prince Regent Awakening the Spirit of Brighton’ is a delicious spoof on William Etty showing the Prince Regent as a portly Cupid gingerly unveiling a sleeping nymph. Dashed off to brighten up the mess sitting-room of his Brighton billet, it marks the end of a long line of more youthful putti who flit through Whistler’s carefree pre-war world — riding bicycles on a poster for the Tate, holding up the clouds over Bath on the cover of an Edith Sitwell book, or sporting tin hats as they scatter propaganda leaflets on a ‘Flying Visit of Truth to Berlin’. The Prince Regent may have been awakening the spirit of Brighton, but one senses that Whistler was saying goodbye to the spirit of youth.
On the evidence here, that youth was far from wasted. True, a large proportion of the show’s 170 exhibits qualifies as decorative rather than fine art, but the fertility of Whistler’s visual invention whether lavished on a bookplate, a stage set or a Clovelly chintz — is dazzling. It’s when he leaves the world of invention that the brilliance dulls. At the Slade he had had surprising difficulty drawing from life, and many of his portraits are curiously stilted — the double portrait of the doll-like Penelope and Angela Dudley Ward doubly so (in his defence, he was infatuated with ‘Pempie’ and ‘almost dying of her loveliness’). He was much better at unlovely people, like the goggleeyed Lord Berners — ‘Alas, only too like him’ was his own verdict — and the commanding ‘Master Cook of the Guards Training Battalion’, painted in 1941 in a grandstand studio at Sandown Park, where Whistler was training as a tank commander.
The lively watercolour ‘Conversation Piece at The Daye House’ (1937) suggests that part of Whistler’s trouble may have been with oil paint, which could also explain the dullness of some of the landscapes. But wartime paintings like ‘Officer’s Mess Tent’ and ‘Night Raid on London’ — an ominous view from a train coming into Paddington under raking searchlights — show another side to Whistler. ‘Night Raid’ was ostensibly painted as another jeu d’esprit to decorate the Officer’s Mess at Codford Camp, but it makes us wonder what Whistler might have achieved had he not been overlooked by Kenneth Clark in his selection of Official War Artists. Whatever the consequences for his art, the decision might have saved his life — lost to a German mortar on 18 July 1944, his first morning in action.
So Whistler’s art remains for ever trapped in a beguilingly precarious Between Time. Had he lived, the muse of the man who drew doodles of baroque tanks during lectures on the strategy of tank warfare would almost certainly have remained ‘amusing’, and thus at odds with the ‘disturbing’ tendency of post-war art. But as Laurence Whistler points out in his 1985 biography of his brother, ‘Whether it is unquestionably better ... to be disturbed than amused is not selfevident.’
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