Jokes and bitterness
Andrew Lambirth
William Orpen: Politics, Sex & Death Imperial War Museum, until 2 May The first question to spring to mind concerning this most welcome and indepth study of the Irish–British painter Sir William Orpen (1878–1931) is why the Imperial War Museum? Recently, there have been notable exhibitions of his contemporaries Augustus John and William Nicholson at the Tate and the Royal Academy respectively, but Orpen it seems does not merit a star ‘art venue’, his life’s achievement (only a fraction of which was actually devoted to the subject of war) being relegated to a repository of machines of mass destruction. I’m sure the director-general and curatorial staff of the Imperial War Museum will forgive me for pointing out that their galleries are best known for their guns and tanks and planes (not to mention the gruelling Holocaust display), rather than for exhibitions of paintings. And yet the IWM does mount extremely good exhibitions of 20th-century artists — consider the Eric Ravilious show last year, and the Piper and Nash shows of earlier date. It just isn’t known for it as the RA or Tate are. Does this weigh against Orpen?
It certainly demonstrates that he’s still not taken particularly seriously by the art establishment, which has perhaps never really forgiven him for being so successful in his lifetime. As the press release reminds us, Orpen was ‘probably the most famous painter in Britain’ when he died. And yet there has never been an Orpen solo show in any of our national galleries. Why? True, he was not avant-garde in any noticeable way, pursuing instead a broadly realist course in the tradition of Velázquez and Manet (look at his handling of blacks in his portraits), yet he brought an original and inventive colourism to that mastery of tonality, and had his own distinctive vision of the world. He enjoyed great technical facility, but this is often held against him, and the dread word ‘superficial’ crops up too often when he is discussed. But look at any of the paintings that really engaged him — his best portraits, such as those of Lady Rocksavage and Count John McCormack, his mocking self-portraits, and nearly all the political and war work (the two categories overlap rather) — and the last adjective to come to mind is ‘superficial’. In these pictures Orpen is deeply committed, and sends a complex series of signals to the viewer’s heart and mind through the brilliant raiment of his paint.
The current exhibition design at the IWM is sensible and unobtrusive, allowing the work to be properly seen, unlike the any-angled Ravilious installation, which called attention to itself at the cost of the paintings. The first half of the show concentrates on Orpen’s self-portraits and conversation pieces, his nudes and his allegories. There are even a number of dark genre paintings (such as ‘The Valuers’ and ‘A Mere Fracture’), which both ape and subvert their Victorian models. Orpen is knowing but not obscure. ‘The Knackers Yard’ echoes Hogarth, Daumier and Pryde, while ‘The English Nude’ is a deliberate reworking of Rembrandt’s ‘Bathsheba at Her Bath’. Against these crepuscular subjects are set such lighthearted and light-filled studies as ‘Park Lane Interior’ and ‘On the Beach, Howth’. The nudes are wonderfully frank for their time, possessing a conviction of satiated desire or early-morning melancholy which must constitute the very aim and meaning of figurative realism.
Walking through this first gallery, one gains an impression of an artist who took his work, but not himself, seriously. Here is the extraordinary series of self-portraits in which Orpen sends himself up gloriously, acting any number of parts with a degree of self-awareness we find oddly modern. Here is an artist steeped in the Old Masters (Dutch Golden Age especially), who deals also in wit and irony, whose many acquaintances but few friends remarked on his peculiar mixture of jokes and bitterness, a small man who revelled in hard work and long hours and parodied himself as ‘Ickle Orps’. A painter who readily mastered technique, and made of style a tool, not a motivation or identity — as was the case with the Vorticists, for instance. He depicts himself as sportsman, jockey, artist, rotter, soldier and socialite; or as Chardin, in a white dressing-gown with his head bound up, in his prize-winning costume for the Chelsea Arts Ball. In ‘Self-Portait with “Sowing New Seed”’, background details from one of his own allegories offer a fractured and plausible image of his innermost preoccupations, painted with all the stark assertiveness and contemporary sensibility of Kitaj.
The second half of the exhibition, the military wing, is found by way of the immovable vastness of Sargent’s great painting ‘Gassed’, reminding us that Orpen inherited Sargent’s mantle of society portraitist. There are drawings on view here, including a beautifully sensitive black chalk study of Jack Knewstub, and an ink ‘Self-Portrait on the Hills above Huddersfield’, with Orpen debunking himself as lord of all he surveys. A stern portrait of Churchill appropriately heralds the war section, which consists of five galleries, mostly of scenes from the first world war and Orpen’s stint as an official War Artist. This addition makes the exhibition a large one, and fully justifies its presence at the IWM. Orpen gave all the war pictures from his 1918 exhibition at Agnews (opened by Lord Beaverbrook and visited by 9,000 in its first month) to the IWM, which accounts for the number of works here.
Orpen was a master of the combined pencil and watercolour study (look at such searing images as two wounded RFC officers breakfasting and ‘A Death among the Wounded in the Snow’), and his control of charcoal was exquisite (see the drawings of men just out of the trenches near Arras). But one of the finest war pictures is the oil ‘German Wire, Thiepval’, which works both as a documentary study and as an original painting in its own right. Quite different in mood, but equally inventive in colour, is ‘View of Montmartre’ (1919), done when he was in Paris for the Peace Conference.
A staunch supporter of the common soldier and against the ‘frocks’ (the frockcoated politicians and diplomats all set to make a hash of peace), Orpen had difficulty in coming to terms with his war experience. He had begun to drink hard and may have suffered some sort of breakdown. He may also have contracted syphilis, which would account for his rapid physical decline. His art went out of fashion, and only began to receive proper attention again in the 1980s. This exhibition should do something to rehabilitate his artistic reputation, but I fear it will not be enough. Despite the title — a mistaken and poortaste attempt to sex up Orpen’s image this is a valuable show which deserves wide attention.
The opening times for Hans Schmoller, the Penguin Years in last week’s issue were incorrect. The exhibition is, in fact, open Tuesday and Thursday 12–5.30, and Wednesday 12–9.
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