Page 55 - Studio International - July August 1975

some of the larger paintings that 'the
The Modernity poorness of the original document could
not sustain the enlargement' (p.171).
But her judgment also undervalues the
expressive power that resulted from
greatly and demonstrably enlarging
of Late Sickert photographs 'which were slight in the
amount of incident they contained'
(p.171). (While frequently slight in
narrative incident, the photographs were
Richard Morphet rich in both visual and human interest,
as well as having qualities of mystery and
Ever since they were painted, their combining an impersonal, ambiguity).
Sickert's late pictures which derive documentary quality with peculiar Sickert's late photo-based work
frankly from and stay very close to immediacy and reality as representation. continues unbrokenly many of his
photographs have provoked extremes of For a painter whose whole career had long-standing preoccupations, but
praise and dismissal. In her admirable shown an obsession with subject matter, insofar as aspects of his means are newly
key monograph, Sickert (1973), Wendy it would be strange indeed if the choice emphasized, the work often seems almost
Baron is reasonable and objective, but of these photographs, replete with human to leap into a later period. To say that it
sees these late paintings as representing interest, marked any lessening of this contains numerous suggestions for later
a falling off in quality. It is possible, concern. In fact they, like the subject art is neither to assert nor to deny that
however, to see them as a highly matter of the late non-photo-based Sickert saw or would recognize it in
original extension, astonishing because Echoes, represented a fresh device for those terms. An artist's originality lies
of Sickert's age, to a long and focusing human interest. With surely not only in conscious intentions but also
distinguished career. intentional irony, their comparative in those aspects of a work's content or
Such a view would reverse many details banality was at once a means to that end implications with which, by instinct,
of Baron's interpretation. She writes and a way of masking it. The relative he or she imbues it.
(p.169) that 'Sickert's use of impersonal blandness and obviousness of these Photo-based painters of two later
documents [photographs] was a frank motifs did indeed simultaneously direct generations whose work seems strangely
acknowledgment that subject matter was attention to the procedural origins and foreshadowed by Sickert's are Bacon',
of secondary importance to him', and sheer appearance of paint as material and who must, and Warhol, who may not,
implies that it is in the abstract qualities facture, in ways more accessible to late have known it. Although it is impossible
of the photo-based paintings that their twentieth-century sensibility than to to say what conscious influence, if any,
supporters see merit. But surely the that of the 193os. For this reason alone Bacon derived from Sickert's photo-
photographs' appeal to Sickert lay in one would question Baron's opinion of based work, it is equally impossible
to believe that it did not affect his art on
some level. A straightforward
description of elements of Sickert's
magnificent 1935 painting Sir Alec
Martin, K.B.E., which incidentally was
painted at least two years after Bacon's
first use of a photograph as a direct
source for painted imagery '. will serve to
suggest some of the strange aspects of
continuity. As in the case of several
paintings by Bacon' (and Warhol), this
Sickert is a portrait of a friend based on a
photograph taken for the artist by a
third person. Like its companion
paintings, Lady Martin (Tate Gallery)
and Claude Phillip Martin, it was based
on a snapshot taken by Sickert's third
wife, Therese Lessore. Its size is
comparable to that of several Bacon
paintings of seated figures. The sitter,
who like several Bacon (and Warhol)
sitters combined art expertise and
connoisseurship with a distinguished
career in commerce, is given an
expression, part-smile, the enigmatic
character of which may derive from the
fall of light, as registered by the camera
lens, on his glasses; at any rate the eyes
are strangely, almost disturbingly, vague.
Though obviously pure coincidence, it is
curiously suggestive that the sitter's face
somewhat resembles that of the then
reigning Pope Pius XI, whose
p bespectacled successor's and one of whose
predecessor's appearances memorably
affected certain works by Bacon to which
the composition of this painting bears
a general resemblance. As in many
Bacon paintings, the interior space is
rendered complex by reflections in a
mirror. And also as in Bacon the

Sir Alec Martin, K.B.E. 1935
Oil on canvas, 55 x 42½ in.
Tate Gallery

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