THE DIARIST’S ART

Philip Hook is struck by the variety of fascinating journals by artists over the centuries, which reveal a private side of the individuals who were writing for themselves rather than the public.

I have always been interested by painters who can write. Some artists of course remain resolutely mute, unable or unwilling to express themselves verbally. That doesn’t make them less good painters. One doesn’t demand of writers that they should paint in order to give the fullest account of themselves; if one did, only a relatively small number would qualify to be taken seriously: August Strindberg, Victor Hugo, Edward Lear and John Ruskin; perhaps also Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and William Morris. But because I enjoy diaries I am particularly drawn to painters who keep them. In research for my recent book Breakfast at Sotheby’s (2013) I began scouring the shelves of The London Library for examples. I found a surprising number of artists who kept records of their day-to-day lives, from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, from Albrecht Dürer to Keith Haring.

What makes artists diverting diarists is that the solitude demanded by painting can breed a certain eccentricity. Artists’ diaries are valuable first-hand despatches from the bohemian front line, intimate records of the anarchic, obsessive, destructive and sometimes downright comic ways in which creative people live. As early as 1555 Jacopo Pontormo is interspersing an account of his painting of the frescoes in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence with neurotic notes about his own diet and digestion. Three hundred years later Gustave Courbet confides that whenever he finishes a painting for exhibition it brings on his haemorrhoids.

Eugène Delacroix, Femmes à la Fontaine, 1854. © Sotheby’s.

The essential quality of a diary is its immediacy, what Virginia Woolf calls ‘the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along … the advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are the diamonds of the dustheap’ . Where does one find the most such diamonds in artists’ diaries? Having read my way through around 50 journals from the Library’s shelves, I have homed in on five that I think are the best. As a diarist, Eugène Delacroix is definitely one of the stars. His vivid and intelligent journals are among the great personal testimonies of art history. In his youth he takes the romantic’s feverish pleasure in chasing girls and in painting them: ‘I again had my key in the keyhole of my sweet Emilia,’ he writes of his model in January 1824. ‘It in no way dampened my enthusiasm’ (from Painter of Passion: The Journals of Eugene Delacroix, translated by Lucy Norton, 1995). He visits London a year later and his Parisian sensibility is horrified:

‘What shocked me most is the absence of anything we should call architecture. ’ The impact that North Africa has on a European is perceptively described in the account of his first journey there. ‘There is beauty in everything they do, ’ he writes of the Arabs in 1832. ‘But we, with our corsets, narrow shoes and tubular clothing, are lamentable objects. We have gained science at the cost of grace. ’ In his later years he grows more reclusive but loses none of his skill in using words to express visual experience. He is also a laconic observer of society. Towards the end he deplores the speed of travel newly introduced by railways as symptomatic of ‘the thirst for riches which brings so little happiness [and] will turn us into a world of stockbrokers’ .

Paul Klee, Freundlicher ort, 1919. © Sotheby’s.

As Delacroix was recording his thoughts and actions in the first half of the nineteenth century, on the other side of the Channel Benjamin Robert Haydon was also keeping a diary. Haydon was a very average History Painter but a marvellous writer. An important quality in a diarist is a willingness to consider, even at times embrace, your own inadequacy and ridiculousness. Haydon is the victim of a debilitating folie de grandeur in his estimation of his own painting, but as a diarist he expresses an endearing awareness of his own personal fallibility. The tension between the two lies at the heart of his appeal. He charts his own ups and downs: on a bad day ‘The melancholy demon has grappled my heart, & crushed its beatings, its turbulent beatings, in his black, bony, clammy, clenching fingers’ . But on a good day he declares: ‘when I paint I feel as if Nectar was floating in the Interstices of the brain’ (from Neglected Genius: The Diaries of Benjamin Robert Haydon 1808–1846, edited by John Joliffe, published in 1990). On the day his beloved daughter dies he finds himself remembering there is no ketchup in the house and stops to buy a bottle. ‘Such is human sympathy!’ he laments. ‘I wept bitterly at her Death, & did not feel less hungry of my dinner!’ Battered by life, Haydon finally commits suicide. His last diary entry is almost impossible to read with a dry eye.

Keith Vaughan, Pupitre, 1945. © The Estate of Keith Vaughan. All rights reserved, DACS 2015.

As you would expect of a man who memorably described his own idiosyncratic art as ‘taking a line for a walk’ , Paul Klee’s diaries – published in The Diaries of Paul Klee (1898–1918), edited by Felix Klee (1965) – provide insights into an extraordinary visual imagination. His journal runs only as far as 1918, but it is evident early on that he has a poetic eye. ‘Oh, the overflowing jumble, the displacements, the bloody sun, the deep sea filled with tilted sailboats, ’ he rhapsodises while on a trip to Italy in 1902. ‘Theme upon theme, till you could lose yourself in it. To be human, to be ancient, naive and nothing, and yet happy. ’ There are moments of comedy, too. The account of a bungled visit to a brothel in his youth is self-mockingly honest. And he is an eyewitness to the First World War, in which he served on the German side. He describes the military band accompanying his fellow soldiers retreating exhausted from the front line: ‘Nothing heroic, just like beasts of burden, like slaves. Against a background of circus music.’

If a writer’s intimate journal is a book about how hard it is to write a book, then an artist’s is a book about how hard it is to paint a picture.

Keith Vaughan was a talented but painfully introverted British painter of the post-war years. His diary, published in his Journals, 1939–1977 (1989), is a graphic account of his dayto-day uncertainties. He fears that artists ‘are destroyed in their creating’ . Or is he a fraud? He decides that ‘there is no choice now but to go on until I’m found out’ .

He has occasional rays of hope. ‘Today I’ve felt that wonderful elation of being involved. Of struggling with a problem I understand and which I know is soluble. It is not necessary to succeed in solving it to enjoy the struggle.’

There is an essential humanity, humour and intelligence about him that makes you read on. ‘Feel like this notebook, ’ he records: ‘Narrow, feint and ruled. ’ Despite the dispiriting gloom in which he enshrouds himself, you like the man. That’s why the final entry - describing his suicide, by an overdose of pills, and what it feels like as he sinks away – is so shocking and so moving.

On 5 July 1983 Andy Warhol writes: ‘There was a party at the Statue of Liberty, but I’d already read publicity of me going to it so I felt it was done already’ (from The Andy Warhol Diaries, edited by Pat Hackett, published in 1989).

Warhol’s diaries are despatches from the war zone of fame, where he spent considerably more than 15 minutes. He dictated them every morning to his long-suffering secretary, and they record everything: his glittering social life, his studio practice, his anxieties and his expenditure. Warhol emerges as an oddly innocent, insecure yet sympathetic human being.

‘It was a beautiful day. Walked on the street and a little kid, she was six or seven with another kid, yelled "Look at the guy with the wig" and I was really embarrassed, I blew my cool and it ruined by afternoon. So I was depressed'. These diaries are frank, honest and extremely diverting to read. Now and then you wonder if they aren't even better than his paintings.

A diary often represents the therapeutic externalisation of painful internal motions of the soul. Writing it down makes the pain better, more comprehensible, more copable with.

And for some it is a means of imposing discipline on life: Ford Madox Brown meticulously records the number of hours he has put in at work in the studio each day. One suspects he exaggerates slightly, but it helps him feel better. And one dull Sunday in Geneva, on 7 September 1856, John Ruskin calculates 'the number of days which under perfect term of human life' he might have left to him to live: 11,795, he concludes, and solemnly reduces that figure by one on each successive diary entry. He keeps it up for nearly two years.

On The London Library shelves there's a wonderful range of writing by artist-diarists to be enjoyed, offering insights into the gestation and creation of some important works of art. The attractive feature common to many of them is their sincerity and spontaneity.

The authors write for their own purposes, not for their public, who are the audience for their art, not their journals. There are certainly diarists who have kept their journals self-consciously, with an eye to publication. Refreshingly few of them are painters.

Andy Warhol in London in 1984. Photo by AGIP/ RDA/Getty Images.