Honest observer
Laura Gascoigne
Laura Knight at the Theatre Lowry Galleries, until 6 July
Ascot racegoers whose binoculars wandered from the track in 1936 might have spotted something unusual in the car park: a Rolls-Royce with its back door open and an artist working at an easel inside. Odder still, the artist was a woman — Laura Knight — and unlike her friend Munnings she wasn’t painting the horses. Her subjects were the gypsy fortune-tellers who worked the race crowds as alternative tipsters.
In 1936 Dame Laura Knight (1877–1970) was a household name, newly elected as the only woman member of the Royal Academy seven years after being created DBE. Having made her name as a painter of Newlyn beach scenes, Knight had won national popularity with her pictures of the circus and ballet. Unlike Degas, she wasn’t content with anonymous danseuses. From 1919 she obtained permission to work backstage at Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, gaining intimate access to the dressing-rooms of prima ballerinas Lopokova and Pavlova, and catching the stars off guard and en déshabille.
These famous names of the ballet are now history, and so was Knight’s until The Lowry arts centre in Salford — where the Kirov performs next month — decided to accompany its ballet season with the exhibition Laura Knight at the Theatre. Not much has been seen of Knight since her RA retrospective of 1965, when critics dismissed her work as ‘vulgar’. But since that word has now almost lost its meaning, it may be time for a reassessment.
The 80 works in this show span three decades from the early 1920s, when Knight was in her 50s, to the early 1950s, when she was over 80. The early rooms focus on Russian dance stars glimpsed from the wings or in their dressing-rooms: Lopokova flying as if on wires in ‘Les Sylphides’ (c.1920) and returning to earth to adjust ‘The Ballet Shoe’ (c.1932); Pavlova presenting her haughty profile for a black crayon drawing (c.1920) or posing as a statuesque ‘Grecian Dancer’ — with surprisingly stout legs — for a suite of etchings. Later rooms feature on-the-spot theatre sketches done backstage at Birmingham Repertory productions (Knight once captured the 20-year-old Gielgud as Romeo smoking while cleaning his nails with an orange stick). She was always avid for new artistic experiences. ‘It is ridiculous,’ she admitted in her bestselling 1936 autobiography Oil Paint and Grease Paint, ‘one person cannot paint everything and work in all mediums’. But she tried.
For a show-off who loved the limelight, literally and metaphorically, Knight’s vision of the theatre is actually rather complex. Her paintings are backstagey rather than stagey, constantly pulling the dressing-room rug from under the illusion to remind the audience how the trick is done. In ‘No 1 Dressing Room’ (1927–47), a lithe young dancer, stripped to the waist, twists around to pin up her golden hair while a blackclothed dresser behind her mends her tutu. As its title shows, the picture’s subject is not the star but the dressing-room, where Knight found ‘everything was glorious to paint’. As a no-nonsense northern artist who made no distinction between painting Carmo’s Circus and the Nuremberg Trials, she identified with the cockney dressers’ classless attitude: ‘Panto — opera — ballet — just another crowd to hook up and peel.’ Dancers, dressers, circus artistes, gypsy fortune-tellers, wartime factory-workers: Knight liked painting other hardworking women. In ‘The Little Ballet Dancer’ (1921) we glimpse her easel reflected in Lopokova’s dressing-room mirror. It’s a comment on art and illusion: this looks like magic, the picture says, but it’s work.
The magic sometimes fails. Knight’s oil colours can be garish — they do no favours to Picasso’s costume designs for the Cuadro Flamenco — but her drawings and prints are sensitive and subtle. One discovery is the hand-coloured etching ‘Putting on Tights’ (1926), showing a nude dancer bending over in a daring pose strikingly similar to Sickert’s ‘Woman Washing her Hair’ of 20 years earlier, but better observed. Diaghilev’s old ballet master Cecchetti had such faith in Knight’s command of anatomy that he used her sketches to critique his dancers’ technique. The pastel drawing ‘Ballerina Getting Dressed’ (1924) is another vivid study of a working dancer, neck muscles straining and legs sturdily braced as she leans forward, chin on chest, to tie her culottes. Degas would have veered between pathos and voyeurism; Knight views her subject as a fellow-trouper.
Knight’s passion for painting on the spot, trying ‘to make the first touch the final touch throughout the whole work’, gives her images a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-down-to-it quality refreshingly different from the precious picture-making of the Camden Town Group. It can also make her heavy-handed. A critic in Apollo in 1930 regretted her single-minded obsession with ‘the Truth, the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth’ when ‘every artist should know it is his or her duty to be a splendid liar’. But the splendid lies that dazzle contemporaries don’t always work on future generations, whereas good honest observation never dates.
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