Exhibitions
Dora Carrington, 1893 - 1932 (Barbican, till 10 December)
A poignant reminder
Richard Shone
N., I have not seen the film. But I have seen a film, a flickering home-made black-and-white one, projected on to a wall at the Barbican Art Gallery. It was made in 1929 by Carrington and several friends, and must surely be counted as England's contri- bution to that genre of Lustmord so popu- lar in Weimar Germany. It provides us with a glimpse of the elaborate entertainments for which Bloomsbury and its friends were famous. Other sequences of film on view include the athletic attractions of David Garnett and Ralph Partridge (Carrington's husband) diving into a pond, a scene remi- niscent of Bazille's famous painting in the Fogg Art Museum, and a glimpse of Lytton Strachey at an upper window, banging his fist on the sill in smiling appreciation of some antics on the lawn below. How genial and robust he looks — so like Jonathan Pryce! Carrington planned and dressed the main feature with its lovely shots of Rachel Cecil in her bath, innocent of the murder- ous attentions of Saxon Sydney-Turner, the least-known, silent man of 'Old' Blooms- bury, seen here in devilish animation as the young things of the cast cavort about him. Carrington herself seems to have learnt deportment from watching Emma Thomp- son. Apart from a handful of her paintings, these cine-films may be the strongest mem- ory visitors will take away with them from the Barbican's tribute to this elusive artist.
There are a good number of British painters from earlier this century who deserve a retrospective on the spacious scale devoted to Dora Carrington. Ethel Walker and Ethelbert White, John Tun- nard and Tristram Hillier, Charles Ginner and Gilbert Spencer come to mind; and what about Nevinson or Duncan Grant, Henry Lamb or Frances Hodgkins? There are few institutions willing to risk the mounting of such shows — the beer is too small, the colour too local, the sponsors too few. Yet the Camden Arts Centre, for example, has made exceptionally good cases in recent years for the work of Edward Wadsworth and Mark Gertler.
That Carrington deserves her tiny niche in the edifice of modern British art is proved by a few paintings in the current show. But it certainly does not endorse the words of her biographer, Gretchen Gerzi- na, that she was 'a major figure of her peri- od'. It can be a delightful surprise to come across one of her decorative paintings on glass or a fine-tuned pencil drawing on the walls of a private house or specialist collec- tion. But they are nearly always a poignant reminder that Carrington was indeed an artist rather than that she has been, in John Rothenstein's intemperate words, 'the most neglected serious painter of her time'. I myself would give away all her paintings to hold on to her inimitable, deceptively sim- ple and often hilarious letters (where is the new edition, promised years ago?). For comic drawings and startling vignettes found throughout her correspondence she was undoubtedly gifted, and a number of these letters are included in the Barbi- can show.
That Carrington was a fine flower of the Slade School of Art under the pencil-sharp direction of Professor Tonics is borne out by the earliest paintings and drawings on show. There seems little or no influence from that other pillar of the Slade, Wilson Steer. She appears, though, at a crucial period (c.1913-16), to have rejected the implications of current French painting, for which she professed admiration; unlike others among her contemporaries, she was never Rogered by Fry and his gospel of Cezanne, let alone Picasso and Matisse. She remained close to Augustus John, Henry Lamb, John Nash and the Spencer brothers. This was probably a good thing: when their more traditional methods are sieved through her own peculiar, feline vision, she made her best paintings. These come during her early years living with Lyt- ton Strachey, from 1916 to the mid-1920s. It seems to me that in the celebrated Tid- marsh Mill (with its black swans) and in the Lake District landscapes (one of which is lent by the Tate Gallery), her sinuous curves and juxtapositions of strong, flat colour derive from Gauguin's views of Brit- tany. But it is an echo (caught perhaps from early Stanley Spencer and Mark Gertler) rather than a full-blown homage. She remained a tight painter — small smooth brush strokes, careful contours and thought-through overall design. Only the head of David Garnett against shelves of books appropriately nods towards Grant and Bell in their domesticated Post- Impressionist phase. The outstanding paintings of this period include the magis- terial portrait of an old Cornish woman, Mrs Box; the portrait of Strachey reading, in profile (surely influenced by Simon Bussy's portrait of Lytton's father), and the view of tumescent hills near Yegen. Other portraits, such as that of E.M. Forster, are sensitive and precise rather than penetrat- ing.
Thereafter the exhibition peters out into tinsel-and-glass paintings and whimsical objects, set among recreations of the rooms Carrington decorated, a sort of finicky rural equivalent of Rex Whistler or Mary Adshead. The few paintings from the later years, including several flower-pieces, are distinctly below par.
The Barbican is not entirely renowned for the scrupulousness of its labelling and cataloguing. Here, however, Jane Hill (author of the latest book on Carrington's art) has been in charge. She has been inde- fatigable in finding works by Carrington (nearly all in private hands) but is some- times shaky on context and history, as her book demonstrates. Surely the copy of a Giotto at Arezzo, which she dates to c.1928, was made for a show of copies after the Old Masters held at the Omega Work- shops in 1918. What on earth did Steer learn from the Pre-Raphaelites? It is odd to state that Fry would have been dismis- sive of any decoration for the Omega that was not abstract; his own rarely were. And the photo in her book of Strachey's library dated c.1918 must be later, for the painting on the wall by Duncan Grant was not acquired by Strachey until 1920. These are all small details, but they suggest that hard work and enthusiasm do not always make up for lack of attention to scholarly detail. And it was inconsiderate of the Barbican not to have produced even a skeleton checklist of the works they exhibited, all of which they took such pains to display in a sympathetic setting. But when all is said and done, go to the show and don't miss the other film.
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