Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU WALTER SICKERT Tate Britain, 28th April to 18th September

Let me begin by getting the nonsense out of the way. Walter Sickert was interested in the Camden Town murder and claimed to have been told the identity of Jack the Ripper, but he was no more the Ripper than Patricia Cornwell, who has made a long career writing about violent death, is the Boston Strangler.

Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) was the German-born son and grandson of Danish artists, and had English and Irish maternal ancestry. He was a pupil of and assistant to Whistler, protégé and champion of Degas, and lover of the grimier areas of London, as well as Venice and Dieppe where he spent much time. In effect, he was a cosmopolitan artist with a streak of Yorkshire grit in the mix.

A witty and perceptive critic, he had wide-ranging sympathies. He was not just the champion of Continental impressionists and modernists. He admired good work soundly based on draughtsmanship – ‘Line is the language of design’ – wherever he found it. He

Walter Sickert Left: The Trapeze (1920). Below: L’Hôtel Royal, Dieppe (1894). Below right: Self-portrait (c 1896) praised Victorian narrative painters and Birket Foster’s well-drawn peasant children as well as Van Gogh and Wyndham Lewis. For this reason, like Whistler and Degas, he revered Charles Keene as the greatest English artist of the 19th century.

Sickert’s own influence in encouraging the British to follow Continental developments was as great as that of Roger Fry (although as critics they were not invariably kind to each other). His teaching was invaluable to the following generation.

For a while, his late work, often derived from press photographs, was regarded as a decline. It is now seen as his most forward-looking, prefiguring as it does the practice of Francis Bacon and Gerhard Richter.

I remember being strongly impressed by the Hayward Gallery show of late work in 1981-82, which was a manageable size. Given the Tate tendency to immenseness, this show of over 150 works – ‘the biggest London retrospective in 30 years’ – is a little worrying.

However, that is small-scale compared with the recent exhibition at the Walker Gallery, Liverpool, boasting 300 paintings and drawings together with work by Sickert’s third wife, Thérèse Lessore.

The laudable aim here is to illuminate all sides of his career: paintings and etchings, theatres and music halls, portraits and nudes, and the light and atmosphere of Dieppe and Venice. It is to be hoped that the organisers live up to another Sickert dictum: ‘Nothing is wasted and nothing can be spared.’

Fittingly, it is a collaboration between the Tate and the Petit Palais, and it will go on to Paris from October until next January.