Walter Sickert and the Theatre of War British Art at War: Bomberg, Sickert and Nash

Taking shelter from a dark, metallic sky,

Londoners gather in the Lyceum Theatre -

October 13th, 1915 -

to forget the atrocity unfolding in the trenches.

Their entertainment soon cut short.

From German Zeppelins, bombs rained down,

killing 17, injuring 21.

Walter Richard Sickert had once been an actor on the Lyceum stage.

Although, by 1915, he'd become Britain's most famous painter.

But, in a sense, he'd never left the stage behind.

Always shapeshifting between roles,

Sickert's appearance never stayed still.

And his art, too, was in perpetual transformation.

Dazzlingly original, deeply unsettling,

poised on the brink of violence.

Proof that Sickert's the godfather of modern British art.

But, for a few at the fringes,

evidence that he was Jack the Ripper.

Sickert's only crime was to tell the truth about the times he lived in -

notably the absurd tragedy of World War I.

Too old to fight in Flanders, Sickert painted edgy,

compelling, subtle pictures of those who'd been left behind.

He painted people trying to get on with lives

that were being shattered by the conflict.

Almost alone of his generation, Sickert truly understood

that the theatre of war was not confined to the trenches.

Other artists, young enough to fight,

attempted to wrestle the conflict into meaning.

This series tells the story of three British painters

whose lives coincided with this world-changing moment.

They set out to depict a new world,

but found themselves working in the rubble.

Before the curtain rose on the life of Walter Sickert,

the stage was already set.

A passion for art and a flair for the theatrical

ran through Sickert's veins.

Walter was the first-born child of Oswald and Eleanor Sickert.

His father, born in Denmark, was a Paris-trained artist.

His mother was English by birth -

the illegitimate daughter of an Irish chorus girl.

Sickert rejoiced in his mongrel roots,

performed them like a music hall turn, complete with punch line.

"No-one could be more English than I am.

"Born in Munich in 1860, of pure Danish descent!"

The family moved to England in 1869, settling in London.

By the age of 12, Sickert felt English with a vengeance.

And he looked so English that the artist George W Joy

recast him as a young Horatio Nelson.

The first of many metamorphoses -

from young Bavarian to English naval hero.

Sickert felt at home when in character.

Acting seemed the ideal profession.

Aged 24, every inch the matinee idol.

"Like a spirit from some world where no-one had ever been unhappy,"

as he was conjured up by his future wife, Ellen Cobden.

Sickert was clearly destined for fame,

of one kind or another.

Sickert's self-belief paid off.

A series of bit-parts followed on the Lyceum stage,

and he was then hired as a utility player

in a touring production of Henry V.

He didn't appear under the foreign sounding name Walter Sickert,

but under the stage name "Mr Nemo" - Latin for "No Man".

Partly a reference to his lowly status as a bit-part actor,

but also, a sly wink to the shifting masks of the actor.

Now, he may not have continued with his career on the stage,

but Sickert did, I think, live the rest of his life

as if it were a theatrical performance,

and nothing could have been more boring to him

than to play just one role.

He was always a shapeshifting character

moving from one part to another, one city to another,

one relationship to another.

Sickert was a man who could not stay still.

But only bit-parts materialised.

His looks and charisma failed to ignite his career.

Sickert's was a precocious talent -

even more gifted at the easel than he was on the stage.

Art was his true vocation.

But how was he to pursue it?

The work of one painter, American by birth and 26 years his senior,

seemed to point a way forward.

"Art for art's sake" was the fashionable phrase of the day

and no-one embodied that more fully than James Abbot McNeill Whistler,

the "Butterfly".

Now, his painting may have been

as evanescent and as shimmering as a butterfly's wings,

and his titles were certainly ethereal -

Nocturne, Composition, Arrangement -

all drawn from the world of music,

but in real life, he was a combative and aggressive man.

A butterfly, yes, but with a sting in his tail.

As those who tangled with Whistler knew all too well.

Nocturne In Black And Gold - The Falling Rocket.

"A pot of paint flung in the public's face,"

the art critic John Ruskin had howled.

Dazzling, showy,

entirely lacking in substance.

Just like a firework.

Whistler struck back, suing Ruskin.

It was the art trial of the century,

and in its wake, Sickert fell under Whistler's spell.

The young artist had enrolled at the Slade School of Art in 1881,

but found the academic approach there stifling.

He abandoned his art school education

and became Whistler's apprentice.

Sickert's early work proves that he gleaned much from Whistler -

low-toned palette, spare composition,

assured handling of colour.

He was happy to call Whistler "the Master"...

for the time being, at least.

Sickert married Ellen Cobden in 1885.

They honeymooned in Dieppe on the Normandy coast.

The seaside town was a la mode for French artists.

That summer, Sickert made a friend for life -

writer and painter Jacques-Emile Blanche.

Sickert quickly adopted the uniform.

He sported a new pointed beard.

It was here in Dieppe in the summer of 1885

that Sickert renewed his acquaintance with Edgar Degas,

the great French painter of modern life.

The painter of weary ballerinas, of tired prostitutes,

of out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye views of Parisian street scenes.

And I think Sickert really...

almost fell in love with Degas

and decided to become a painter of modern life in his own way.

And in a sense, I think the conversation that he began

that year with Degas, he continued it right until the end of his life.

No painter influenced him more than Degas.

Sickert might have been inspired by Degas and Impressionism,

but he mapped new, uncharted territory.

The Red Shop.

A humdrum fragment of modern life.

The shop front glows enigmatically, but remains inscrutable.

The facade of Saint Jacques interrogated again and again.

There's no relish in the play of light and shade.

Just mute architecture.

This is L'Hotel Royal, sickly pallor,

figures as blank-faced as the edifice.

Impressionist subjects, shot through with a modern sense of the uncanny.

Sickert was the first existential painter,

the painter of the non-event.

Dieppe would be one of many homes to the wandering Sickert,

but his way of seeing the world never wavered.

He and his new wife returned to London in the autumn of 1885.

Victorian Britain dealt in certainties -

empire, Christian morality, strict social boundaries.

But towards the end of the century, all that seemed to be in jeopardy.

Most British artists attempted to shore up

crumbling certainties - painting a mythic past,

or a rose-tinted present.

Sickert looked elsewhere.

He looked in the grubbiest of corners.

An artificial paradise fuelled by cheap booze

and the promise of sex, a working-class audience,

some of them heckling, some of them drunk,

most of them having a good time.

Sickert spent night after night

in the cheap seats of London's music halls, taking it all in.

For a painter interested in modern life, this was the perfect subject.

Sickert's music hall is a place of artificial dreams and enchantments.

The Lion Comique, full of life, frozen in song.

He seems about to levitate above the impossible world of the back cloth.

Katie Lawrence -

sherbet lemon siren beguiling her audience in a darkened theatre.

Sickert never lets us forget it's just a performance -

the mask is always about to drop.

The most disconcerting of Sickert's early music hall paintings

is this one.

The composition at first sight is thoroughly baffling.

Here in the foreground, we see the music hall audience

truncated to just three heads in profile.

And behind them, rather than in front of them,

we see the performer, the turn, a young girl, in her red dress.

Why are they not connected to each other?

Why are they not looking at her?

Ah! Sickert gives us a clue here -

the gilt frame of a mirror.

He's framed the composition so that WE see her

from the side in a mirror - they're actually looking at her.

Why should he have done it like that?

Because, I think, the dislocation that he's effected

to him expresses the emotional heart of the scene.

These three old faces - oblivious, bored,

they almost don't seem to have eyes -

they're just not connecting with the young girl

who's almost like a marionette.

Her mouth is half open.

Look at her rather pathetic left white arm down by her side,

she's groaning almost rather than singing.

And he's suffused the scene with this glowing, bright,

sinister vermillion

as if to turn it into an inferno.

Like some kind of modern, gaslit hell,

and it feels very much like the premonition of a tragedy.

Sickert is the main psychological critic of London.

In his painting, the city is a place of endless reinvention

and Sickert, above anybody else, is the painter of reinvention.

Iain Sinclair, himself a piercing chronicler of London,

is compelled by the theatricality

that pervades Sickert's life and art.

I think the world that Sickert's invading

as a kind of alien in that period of the 1880s, 1890s,

is really a moment when the imperial certainties are beginning to dissolve

in interesting ways, which allows him to slip between the cracks,

and play games with identity, to turn up in all sorts of different ways.

And in a sense, the theatre, the music hall,

is a perfect venue for that.

He's nominating these spaces as somewhere to interrogate

the dramas that are going on in the city at large.

The Londoners who've drifted into this space

are like in the Egyptian Book Of The Dead -

they're there, and they're braying,

they're either angry, excited, bobbing about in some strange way,

they relate to the earlier London mobs who went to trials

and wanted to see people hanged

and torn to pieces and burnt in Smithfield.

It's that kind of sense.

Except that the theatre where it now happens is a music hall.

So he gets that, which is the savagery of the imperial city.

I think certain painters have that ability

to be anticipating the future,

and inevitably the horror

is going to come at the end.

It's Conrad again, it's "the horror, the horror".

And Eliot again, the dead amongst us.

Who would have thought so many had been undone?

All of those feelings are there in these paintings.

Before the end of the 19th century,

Sickert had established himself as a fiercely original painter.

It caused trouble with his old mentor Whistler,

who hated an upstart.

Irritation on both sides soon boiled over.

Sickert used his column in The Speaker to fire a volley

at one of Whistler's most pompous and boring acolytes,

a man named Joseph Pennell.

Pennell had produced a series of lithographs,

which, Sickert said, weren't true lithographs.

It was a snide attack and it was a technicality.

But it misfired.

Egged on by Whistler, Pennell took Sickert to court

and won £50 in damages.

Whistler's response? "Enemy met and destroyed - Sickert in ambulance."

Sickert put a brave face on it.

In 1895, he sailed for the Continent.

In Venice, Ellen discovered a letter from his mistress, Ada.

The artist's response?

To start another affair.

Sickert claimed to be a passionate believer in marriage,

although he also seems to have been pathologically unfaithful.

And as news filtered through to Venice

of yet more of his infidelities, he confessed to Ellen

that he'd lived the life of an adulterer,

and couldn't imagine living any other.

I wonder if he was alive to the irony

that his marriage was falling apart

in the city of perpetual disintegration.

By September 1896, Sickert's marriage to Ellen was over.

The artist was unsurprised, but devastated.

The mask momentarily slipped in a self-portrait.

He looks wearily over his shoulder,

as if hounded, or haunted, by his past.

Red-rimmed eyes, face both made and destroyed by thick brushstrokes.

Startlingly modern, painted in 1896.

Sickert was alone in Venice, and found a convenient refuge -

his work.

When Sickert came to Venice, he knew very well that he was following

in the footsteps of some of the most famous painters who'd ever lived -

Canaletto, Turner, Monet -

and you might have expected him to steer clear

of the scenes they'd made famous, but he didn't.

He painted the Grand Canal, he painted the facade of St Mark's.

It's as if he knew that if he painted what he saw

filtered through his sensibility,

something new and different would emerge.

And he was right - Sickert's Venice is unlike any other.

The facade of St Mark's, viewed square on.

Same motif, same framing,

by day, or beneath a red sky at night.

The facade - designed to look splendid, now ragged and worn -

failing to hide the reality.

Venice was a piece of failed theatre, barely afloat.

Another turn gone sour.

Sickert's Venetian views sold well.

But, by 1903, the artist had painted every drowned inch

of "Kilburn-in-the-Sea", as he liked to call Venice.

Bad weather forced him indoors,

behind the crumbling walls lapped by water,

where the glamorous myth of Venice was belied by whorehouse reality.

A number of prostitutes became his sitters in Venice.

They modelled for him in his lodgings at the Calle dei Frati.

He may also have paid them to sleep with him.

He confessed to Jacques-Emile Blanche

that he'd caught the clap in Venice.

"Now...", he wrote rather bitterly, "..now I'm a grown-up."

La Giuseppina - bird's nest perched on her head,

wild eyes, pained expression.

Her mother, Mamma Mia Poveretta - haggard and vacant,

a husk where there was once life.

Raw, unvarnished images of women.

Transcriptions of tough lives.

Sickert had spent ten years on the Continent,

away from London and its rather provincial art world.

He'd found his own places - above all, Dieppe and Venice -

his own subjects, and his own style of painting.

Now, in 1905, he was ready to return.

Sickert set sail for Britain, in no mood for settling down.

To him, fashionable London reeked

of the stale whiff of the establishment.

So Sickert rented rooms not in Chelsea,

but around Fitzroy Street and Camden Town -

the wrong side of the tracks.

Prostitutes were hired as models.

Foxed mirrors, cheap dressers, metal bedsteads.

His drab lodgings supplied the props.

Sickert stage-managed a series of pictures,

the Camden Town nudes, that laid bare the underbelly of British life.

A dingy backend, soiled sheets, bilious light.

A woman sinking into a soft mattress,

devoured by the tools of her own trade.

Dawn, Camden Town.

Another iron bedstead.

Naked woman, clothed man crumpled at the foot of the bed.

Modern life divested, a tawdry reality laid bare.

If you want to understand just how daring and original Sickert was

as a painter of the human form, above all, a painter of the nude,

it's a good idea to compare him with his contemporaries.

This is a picture by Lawrence Alma-Tadema done in 1909.

Alma-Tadema was the master of the tasteful classical nude.

And here we see two rather English-looking girls

titillatingly disporting themselves in a pool of Pompeiian water.

A very different pond over here.

This is Sickert's La Hollandaise.

A woman, a naked woman, in her bed.

There's nothing idealised, remote, fantastical, imaginary

about this body - it's a real person.

I see this as a representation of all of us.

The human animal alone,

caged within the basic parameters of life -

in this case, the bed.

It's a picture of an ungainly woman being herself in her own space,

in her own time, and no-one else in Britain had painted that.

Human beings are such strange, complex creatures.

There is a feeling that we are not quite at ease with ourselves

in our animal skin.

That whether we're dressed or nude,

there's a sense of awkwardness about us

and I think this is something

that Sickert captures very, very tenderly.

Artist Celia Paul's fascination with Sickert goes back

to her time at the Slade School of Art in the mid '70s.

She paints only sitters she knows intimately,

mostly women, in her home and studio in central London.

I think there is a compassion in the way he portrays women.

An intimacy.

There's a real sense of his charm through her.

I mean, these women are delighted to be sitting for him.

You get the feeling that they actually

love being looked at by him.

They're erotic feelings, in the best sense of the word.

Even though there's a kind of intimate drama

in all of the interiors,

there is a kind of really quite desolate, lonely feeling.

I sort of imagine him looking in through the window

at something that he hasn't got,

and he's decided obviously that this, a domestic life,

is probably something that may be too complicated for him.

Sickert in his 40s was the oldest enfant terrible on the block.

He preferred The Juvenile Lead and wrote a manifesto

for his own dirty realism with typical gusto.

"The more our art is serious, the more will it tend to avoid

"the drawing-room and stick to the kitchen.

"The plastic arts are gross arts,

"dealing joyously with gross material facts.

"While they will flourish in the scullery, or on the dunghill,

"they fade at a breath from the drawing-room."

Sickert, in his latest incarnation, didn't just rattle teacups,

he smashed them to smithereens.

"Worse than slum art, worse than prostitution," wrote one critic.

And Sickert, well, he revelled in the furore -

all publicity being good publicity.

And no subject was off-limits.

Sickert's Camden Town was drab and grimy,

home to the migrant workforce of navvies

responsible for building most of north London's network of railways.

It wasn't a kind place and it could be a violent one.

In the early hours of the morning of the 12th September 1907,

the body of Emily Dimmock,

a local prostitute, was found sprawled on her bed.

Her throat had been cut so deeply her head had almost been severed.

There was blood on the sheets, blood on the floor,

more blood in the washbasin near the bed and on her petticoat

which the murderer had used to wipe his hands clean

after committing the killing.

It was a sad and horrible end to a young woman's life,

which the press instantly banner headlined,

"The Camden Town Murder".

Sickert was gripped by the lurid press coverage of the crime,

and as he said years later,

"Murder is as good a subject as any other."

This is one of Sickert's most daring and ambitious pictures -

a small interior, but what does it shows us?

Well, we see a naked woman,

or, more precisely, we see half a naked woman lying on a bed.

Beside her is a man,

but he's almost a shadow, a smear,

he's totally indeterminate.

You can't see his face, his features.

The picture is a puzzle.

And as if to play with his audience's narrative expectations,

Sickert exhibited it under no less than three different titles.

The first time, he simply called it Summer Afternoon.

Second time around, borrowing a phrase from a music hall song,

which possibly alludes to prostitution -

What Shall We Do About The Rent?

And last of all, he exhibited it with a group of other pictures

under the umbrella title The Camden Town Murder.

And I think the important thing about all of those three titles

is that none of them fits.

How can it possibly be the Camden Town Murder?

Yes, there's a basin on the table behind,

but there's no sign of a weapon.

There's no blood, there's no evidence that the woman is dead.

I think...

I think that what Sickert's actually attempted in this picture

is to paint a fragment of modern reality

that seems as full of doubt and uncertainty

as he felt reality at every moment to be.

He's painting the way in which existence is perpetually a mystery

and he wants to create a picture

that is as perpetually mysterious as life itself.

The Camden Town Murder pictures remain controversial

and they've lent weight to the fantasy

that Sickert wielded both palette knife and killer's blade.

When he was walking home one evening from a music hall,

and he recounted how some girls

who were in the street saw him

coming along and ran away from him shouting, "It's Jack the Ripper!

"It's Jack the Ripper."

It wasn't until after his death that Sickert was accused of the murder

of 11 prostitutes in the grim Victorian slums of Whitechapel.

Matthew Sturgis pored over the case -

based mostly on the sinister mood of Sickert's pictures -

when writing his biography of the artist.

Most recently, we've had the book of Patricia Cornwell,

who convinced herself from staring very hard

at some of Sickert's pictures,

that he was a crazed, woman-hating psychopath.

But, for much of that late summer of 1888, he was away,

not just in Dieppe in France,

but along the coast from Dieppe, in Normandy,

at Saint Valery en Caux.

He can be pinpointed to that little seaside town

on the night before one of the murders,

so it's inconceivable that he could have had anything to do with them.

He spent his life assuming different guises,

and playing different roles, and he would be very amused and delighted

to find that he'd been cast in such a glamorous part as Jack the Ripper.

In 1910, an exhibition of continental works in London

pointed towards a different course for modern art.

Roger Fry's Manet And The Post-Impressionists exhibition.

Britain was rocked by "The Art Quake of 1910",

as it came to be known.

Everyone, that is, except for Sickert.

Sickert was unmoved by the furore. He already knew all about

the post-impressionists and he was distinctly 'un-post-impressed'.

He wrote a scathing review of the exhibition

in which he had a go at Van Gogh.

He simply quoted Voltaire on the nature of madness.

Matisse, he said, was guilty of all the worst art school tricks.

-And Picasso...

-CHUCKLING:

-Little did he know!

Picasso, Sickert said,

"is a quite accomplished sort of minor international painter."

Now, why did the exhibition get Sickert's goat

in the way that it did?

Up until now, he had been a follower, a supporter of the new,

unlike most of his English contemporaries.

But I think, at this point,

he decided to draw a line in the sand.

He could see that where these painters were taking modern art

was away, into abstraction, into pure form, into pure imagination.

He felt there was a danger that painting

could lose touch with the only things that

really mattered to him - human life, human stories.

But Fry's exhibition did prove that modern art was

evolving at an ever-increasing pace.

Sickert was pragmatic. If there were to be changes,

best to have a say in them.

With Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore,

a new exhibiting society was set up -

The Camden Town Group.

And in June 1911, they held their first exhibition.

The style? Modern but not modernist.

1911 was certainly a busy year.

One woman rejected his proposal of marriage, another jilted him

at the altar in favour of a younger man, and then he reverted

"quite justifiably", as he said, "to a previous engagement".

He wired friends - "Marry Saturday, a certain Christine Angus.

"Jeweller would not take wedding ring back."

Christine had been a pupil at the art classes

Sickert gave at his home in Camden.

He was 51. She was 17 years his junior.

He announced that she looked just like a pelican -

a compliment, apparently.

The artist's new happiness didn't alter his essentially

melancholic view of modern life.

He developed a new kind of suspended domestic narrative.

A faceless man lurches off to the pub,

leaving behind a disconsolate wife.

Figures in doom-laden interiors,

suffocated by fetid air.

Sickert's titles are often decoys or diversions or tricks

played on the audience, but in the case of this picture,

I think he really meant the title.

He called it Ennui, which is not quite

the same in French as its English translation, "boredom".

In French, ennui implies disgust, a kind of weariness with life,

and that is what this picture seems to be all about.

It shows us two figures in an interior,

and although they're right next to each other,

they seem to be miles apart.

The man, slumped in his chair,

wearing a suit that's seen better days,

puffing at his cigar.

He's got glassy eyes, he seems entirely

cut off from the reality around him.

Whereas the woman, slumped on the dresser,

she stares at the wall almost like a wounded animal.

Everything in the scene seems charged with bitter meaning.

The glass, perhaps of gin, the booze on the shelf.

But most telling of all, perhaps,

is this hangover from late Victorian taste -

some stuffed birds under a bell jar.

This room, to me, feels like a kind of bell jar, an airless space

in which two sad individuals are living out desiccated lives.

In 1914, Sickert resigned from what had been

the Camden Town Group, appalled by the inclusion of modernist artists.

Feeling alienated and angry, he returned to France.

He purchased a house in Envermeu, near his old haunt of Dieppe.

In this idyllic location,

the artist started another of his private battles.

He painted this obelisk,

with the rising plain behind,

attempting to conquer the scene's complex perspective.

As the great powers moved inexorably towards the Great War,

Sickert turned his face away from the conflict.

He knew he wouldn't be enlisted for fighting.

And he came to this quiet corner of Normandy, not far from Dieppe,

where he set about painting a weather-worn memorial

to a long-forgotten conflict,

a battle fought by Henry IV of France back in 1589.

And when, on the 3rd of August 1914,

Germany did finally declare war on France,

what was Sickert's response?

He simply turned back to his painting and said,

"I can only fight one war at a time."

The perspective Sickert wrestled with was moral, not merely spatial.

The vainglory of kings set against

the slow rhythms of nature, growth and harvest.

The subtlest of anti-war pictures -

a comment on the absurdity of a monument.

Immediately after the outbreak of war,

the Sickerts moved to a less remote location - a hotel in Dieppe.

Sickert reported with amusement that he'd seen

Lady Blanche Hozier camped out in an armchair by the port

watching the British flee back home on steamers.

"C'est la mere de Churchill," the locals whispered,

"It's the mother of Churchill."

Dieppe braced itself.

In 1914, Sickert was also left distraught by the death

of his first wife, Ellen.

She bequeathed him nothing,

having quietly bought his pictures all her life.

Yet, despite private and public tumult,

his creative life had never been better.

"I suppose an eye for drawing is an eye for shooting," he wrote.

When a German plane flew overhead,

Sickert knew it was time to clear out, back to London.

The artist's early war pictures are monumental in scale -

deliberate fragments of the theatre of war.

The Soldiers Of King Albert The Ready take aim,

rifle's cut-off by Sickert's cropping.

Modern warfare is mechanised,

the enemy faceless - the killing happening elsewhere, out of sight.

Sickert, however, sees the consequences.

His favourite motif, the iron bedstead, put to a different use -

a nurse tucking up a wounded soldier.

Even Sickert's domestic interiors become charged with a new meaning.

Girl playing a grand piano, soldier straining to hear her tune.

Tipperary - a title changes everything -

the song on every soldier's lips

as they marched off to war,

and then later at the front, yearning for home.

But there's not much flag waving going on, just a dreadful stillness.

During World War I, unable to travel to his beloved Dieppe,

Sickert holidayed in Brighton.

In the summer of 1915, Brighton was out of kilter, out of joint.

A holiday town, but it didn't feel like it.

There were no young men on the streets.

Brighton Pavilion was being used as a temporary hospital

for injured Indian soldiers.

And on a clear day, you could actually hear the bombardments

going on on the other side of the Channel.

There was an ominous mood about the town

and Sickert was the man to capture it.

Sickert visited the open air theatre on the beach every night

for five weeks, sketching the Pierrot theatre.

Unlike the music hall, there was nothing risque about the show -

this was wholesome family entertainment,

that, it was hoped, would drown out the cacophony of war.

If I had to prove to someone who had never heard of him

that Walter Sickert was one of the great painters of the 20th century,

and if I were allowed only one painting,

this is the picture I'd choose.

I think it's his masterpiece. Brighton Pierrots, 1915.

Sickert self-deprecatingly described it as "a bit of all right",

and I think it's more than that.

A theatrical performance taking place outside,

under artificial light, in Brighton in the early evening.

Here's the stage. There's a line of Brighton houses.

And behind it all this vast bruise of a sky that also

looks like a conflagration, and I think it's Sickert's

way of reminding us that, yes, war is taking place beyond this scene.

Two performers, they look like automata,

robots going through the motions of their turn.

Look at the way in which also this one, he's had his face and his arms

removed by the pictorial cropping of Sickert's composition.

A mirror image of the real disfigurements

and real dismemberments going on across the Channel.

And the central figure of the painting, I think -

look at the way the lines lead towards her - is this pierette,

a faceless pierette in a pink polka-dot dress playing the piano.

Is she the mad organ grinder to who's tune everyone must dance?

He'd always been a brilliant painter of the passing show

but this is the theatre of the absurd.

In the immediate aftermath of World War I,

Sickert resigned from his teaching posts.

His position as an artist no longer certain,

he, together with Christine, moved back to their home in Envermeu.

By 1919, the artist was 59 years old.

He saw this as his final move.

The new serenity of Sickert's life was reflected in his art.

He painted a series of still lives -

simple produce.

After the slaughter of World War I,

he turned to the nourishment that sustains life.

Shortly after moving into the Maison Mouton,

Sickert's tranquillity was shattered.

Christine lost her battle with tuberculosis,

the illness that had plagued her throughout her life.

She died on the 13th October 1920.

Sickert felt as if he was "digesting granite".

Embattled - all but destroyed by the loss of his young wife -

he shaved his head.

In 1922, he returned to a London full of what he called

"palaeo-stuffers" - fossils from the Victorian age,

and "neo-stinkers" -

the new generation who had embraced the sharp edges of modernism.

Sickert belonged in neither camp.

The artist became increasingly dependent on another old pupil,

Therese Lessore.

In Brighton in 1926, he married "Lainey", as he liked to call her.

The same year, Sickert suffered a serious breakdown in his health.

Sickert proved indomitable.

He emerged from his depression in an entirely new guise, and as if to

mark his determination to reinvent himself, he changed his name.

He dropped Walter and called himself Richard Sickert from now on.

The final phase of his work would be marked by bold experimentation

and surprising new developments.

Almost without exception,

Sickert used only photographic sources for the rest of his life.

Photography, according to the artist, was like alcohol -

only to be used by those who don't need it.

And for Sickert, it was never a prop.

Snap taken. Film developed.

Photo selected, cropped and squared up onto canvas.

The process may have been mechanical,

but the idea was revolutionary.

Sickert marked his resurrection with a trio of biblical self-portraits.

The Servant Of Abraham -

the artist's head threatens to burst out of the frame.

Like a small fragment of a colossal picture.

Lazarus Breaks His Fast, of 1927 -

craving food after his resurrection, consumed by his appetites.

Finally, The Raising Of Lazarus,

on a monumental scale.

A professional photographer was hired.

A mannequin was shrouded by an undertaker.

This time, Sickert takes on the role of Christ,

breathing life back into Lazarus.

The composition is impossible - Lazarus suspended mid-air,

Christ levitating above him.

More Frankenstein than New Testament.

The picture was triumphantly received

when exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1932.

Sickert was now, according to a headline,

"Our Greatest Living Painter".

In January the following year,

Germany's own 'resurrector' became Chancellor.

Hitler's aim?

To raise his nation back from the dead. Storm clouds were gathering.

Throughout the '30s, Sickert produced a series of pictures

that seemed to yearn for an England long gone.

The artist faithfully copied, or transcribed,

Victorian illustrations from the magazines of his youth.

Some thought Sickert's pictures sentimental, even idiotic.

But he breathed new life into dead images with a garish palette.

The English Echoes are not an indication

of Sickert's failing powers,

as is being increasingly recognised today.

I just thought that the "Echo" was a great word to describe

something that is fading away.

I experienced it, but as time goes by,

it just becomes a nostalgic reflection.

Like Sickert, artist Keith Coventry turns to found images

and the art of the past for the sources of his work.

He produced his own series,

The Echoes Of Albany, to document the time he spent

living in the exclusive Mayfair apartment block of the same name.

Sickert was accused of being nostalgic

when he painted the Echoes, but, in a way, the irony is that,

out of that maybe-nostalgic looking back at the past,

he created what I think is some of the most modern pictures.

By squaring up,

by faithfully reproducing what was in every square...

..it makes the painting more abstract

because he's only looking at it

one square at a time.

And so, because of that, you get an incredible two-dimensionality.

I just think that risk-taking element and the idea

of appropriation, which is something that we seem to think is

a very modern thing,

but for Sickert, it was really, back in 1930,

it must have seemed quite shocking.

During the early '30s,

the spectacle of flight captured the public imagination.

And Amelia Earhart, the first woman to complete a solo crossing

of the Atlantic, was front page news.

The Daily Sketch celebrated her triumphant arrival in London.

Sickert based the picture on a press photograph

of Miss Earhart's arrival,

and he painted it so fast that,

within a week of the publication of that newspaper,

his picture was on display.

Typical late Sickert marketing.

Here they are, the hard-bitten journos, in their trench coats and

their trilbies, braving the rain, the English weather, the grey sky.

There's the wing of the aeroplane.

But where's Amelia Earhart herself?

You have to struggle to find her.

Sickert's chosen, as his template,

the picture in which her image was most occluded and obscured.

There she is. But you have to look to find her.

This little, ghostly profile, framed right at the margin of the picture.

I think he's painting very much ahead of his time.

I think he's thinking about the nature of celebrity,

the nature of global fame in this world of the new mass media,

and what it does to a person.

In a sense, you could say he's examining exactly the same

phenomenon that Andy Warhol was looking at in his multiple

Marilyn Monroe paintings of the 1960s,

which were all about the way in which a person

disappears into the multiple images of their fame,

the way in which celebrity abolishes or annihilates the human being

at its vortex, at its centre.

And I think there's a kind of irony to this title,

Miss Earhart's Arrival.

Because what Sickert's saying is that,

at the very moment that you arrive in terms of world fame,

you actually begin to disappear.

The artist as alchemist, his studio a workshop where the base matter

of mass-produced images is transformed into gold.

Sickert churned out his copies of copies of the physical world.

And these "transcriptions", as he called them,

were increasingly executed not by the artist himself,

but by his wife, Therese.

Uncannily prescient in style, their subjects also foretell

the inevitable slide towards another World War.

King Edward VIII, still in mourning for his dead father.

The end of the old era,

the next ushered in.

But the king is frozen in motion, caught on the back foot,

Britain pensive in the face of an uncertain future.

In the same year, perhaps most prescient of all -

Il Barone Aloisi...

A dejected old man set against a flooded world.

The Italian diplomat's glory days far behind him.

Aloisi exits the conference after the collapse of talks

on the invasion of Abyssinia.

An event that paved the way for World War II.

Sickert knew that the writing was on the wall.

He taught none other than Winston Churchill to paint.

Years later, when the Sickerts found themselves hard up,

the politician would repay the favour,

arranging to have his old friend's pension supplemented.

The Sickerts retired to Bathampton in 1938.

He painted the view from his window, from a photograph, of course.

# Deutschland, Deutschland, uber alles

# Uber alles in der Welt... #

As the mood darkened, Sickert deployed his own increasingly black sense of humour.

He sang Deutschland Uber Alles in the bath tub,

within earshot of his painting students.

His opinions on fascism ran typically against the grain -

he claimed to approve of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and

he sent a letter to Hitler himself offering to teach him how to paint.

A courteous reply came back. The offer was never taken up.

# Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles... #

In old age, Sickert cultivated the persona of the eccentric,

senile artist - it was the last of his roles.

He didn't live to see the full atrocity of World War II,

perhaps for the best.

On the 22nd January 1942,

Richard Sickert died peacefully in his favourite chair.

Walter had been dead for years.

By the time of his death,

Walter Sickert's position was assured.

He'd painted sides of urban life few were willing face,

and, in the process, given British art a new language of expression.

Without him, the art of Bacon and Freud is unimaginable.

And as for his alter ego, Richard,

when he died, his place wasn't so certain.

His "transcriptions" baffled many contemporaries,

but now seem deeply prophetic of a world saturated

by mechanical reproductions.

In fact, in his various guises,

Sickert was probably the most influential British painter

of the 20th century.

His life may have been theatrical, but it was more than a passing show.

"Lift your head. After ten years,

"you will see you are one amongst thousands.

"Another ten years - among hundreds.

"On, on... And one day, a Monday or a Tuesday -

"with a peacock's feather of luck, you may do better than you know."