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A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War by David Boyd Haycock Jenny Uglow follows the careers of five artists whose lives were defined by the first world warThe friendships made in early youth, writes David Boyd Haycock, are more open and intense than any others. In the heady student days, people forge their adult tastes, fall in and out of love, and build relationships with teachers and peers that influence the rest of their lives. The particular cauldron of intensity into which Haycock plunges is the Slade School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, nestling like an eccentric cousin within the gates of University College London, and the students who experience this "crisis of brilliance" – a phrase coined by their bristly, austere professor of drawing, Henry Tonks – are Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, CRW Nevinson, Paul Nash and Dora Carrington. All studied at the Slade between 1908 and 1912. Their fate was also decreed by a trial of fire, the first world war, that would define their art for the rest of their lives.Haycock has an eye for telling detail, and a fluent style that can embrace the wider international movements of art and the intricacies of institutions, galleries and groups and webs of narratives as effortlessly as it conveys the sexual entanglements, depressions and ecstasies of his subjects.We meet each of them as individuals before the artists arrive, by circuitous routes, in the Antique Room of the Slade, making drawings from casts under the withering glance and lashing tongue of Tonks.Here is Spencer, five foot two – a midget, his father called him – "with his bad teeth and coxcomb of unbrushed hair, his dirty Eton collar and Norfolk jacket", going home every night to his beloved Cookham on its bend of the Thames, and to his large family with their passion for music and their miracle-filled religion.Here is Mark Gertler, thin, wiry, tousle-haired and beetle-browed, dashing off to entertain his mother Golda with imitations of the tittering girls of the glamorous West End, a world away from the impoverished Jewish immigrants of Whitechapel.Here is the strutting Christopher Nevinson, whose intellectual parents had also lived briefly in Whitechapel, but under very different circumstances, his father working at Toynbee Hall – bringing culture to the slums – and his suffragette mother teaching in a local school. Soon, while the Gertlers stayed in the "ghetto", the Nevinsons would move to leafy Hampstead.If the "amusingly menacing" Nevinson patronised Spencer and Gertler in 1909, he found a new target the following year, in the 17-year-old Paul Nash. Although known as a dandy, smartly dressed in suit and spats, Nash was, Haycock tells us, "a reluctant Londoner", full of visions inspired by Blake, Samuel Palmer, Rossetti and Morris, finding his true spiritual home then, and in the future, in the countryside.Nash was the first of the group to fall in love with the daring, talented Dora Carrington, who arrived at the Slade in 1911, bobbed her hair and revelled in her new-found freedom. The chemistry of the group, coming from such different backgrounds, was charged and complex. But Haycock shows us that none of them fully escaped their family past. At one end of the spectrum, for Stanley Spencer, childhood brought enduring imaginative riches; at the other, for the androgynous-looking Carrington, it left lifelong scars, particularly an aversion to sex.Carrington blamed her prudish, authoritarian mother for "taming" her more unconventional father. "You must know I hate my Mother," she wrote baldly, "it is a dull & bare fact. Her name is poison to me." She vowed that she herself would never be pinned down, and her talent and untamed spirit broke hearts. After Nash, Gertler and Nevinson also fell under her spell, their rivalry spiralling into a painful rift. Gertler won this contest, but could never completely win Carrington. After five years of a fraught, intense but sex-denying relationship, Carrington fell for Lytton Strachey, another bond where true companionship was constantly threatened by infidelity and pain.The real passion of this group, however, was not sexual but aesthetic. Their careers began in tumultuous times. In 1910, Roger Fry, then the Slade's lecturer on Renaissance art, staged the eye-opening exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists. Abhorred by such older critics as Wilfrid Scawen Blunt as "works of idleness and impotent stupidity, a pornographic show", the exhibition unveiled to the young painters a new style, shunning narrative and realism for form and style.But Gertler and Nevinson (who both exhibited with Vanessa Bell's Friday Club), and particularly Spencer, were already developing their own neo-primitive approach, looking back to the early Italian Renaissance. Their work prospered. Gertler's portraits began to sell; Carrington was admired in private; Nash's mystical landscapes caused a stir and Spencer's Gauguin-influenced John Donne Arriving in Heaven hung alongside Picasso, Cézanne, Kandinsky and Wyndham Lewis at Fry's second post-impressionist show in 1913. The next movement to sway them was Marinetti's futurism, which appalled the Slade tutors but appealed strongly, as Nevinson's mother explained to her suffragette readers, to "young men in revolt at the worship of the past".As their names became known, so the artists were swept into the orbit of avant-garde movements such as Wyndham Lewis's vorticists, the craft work of Fry's Omega Gallery, and the "Georgian painters" patronised by the stylish, monocled civil servant and collector Eddie Marsh. But parties at the Café Royal were undercut by darkness – at one black point, Gertler's artistic ally and friend John Currie shot his lover Dolly and then himself.Only Spencer resisted the London high-life and refused to belong to any kind of group. But even he was drawn into the fringes of the shifting, modernist circles of "Bloomsbury". Some of his most telling, affectionate letters were addressed to the artists Jacques and Gwen Raverat, and to Ottoline Morrell, who provided a haven for both Spencer and Gertler at Garsington.Gertler was also close to DH Lawrence and Frieda, and to Katherine Mansfield. In the dark days of the war, Lawrence told him, "Nothing matters, in the end, but the little hard flame of truth one has inside oneself. I hope we can add our spirit together, unite in essential truthfulness, in the end, and create a new well-shapen life out of the smashed mess of the old order."The war smashed into their lives as well as the old order. Haycock follows the hostilities with powerful economy, while tracing the artists' own splintered trajectories. Gertler escaped conscription though ill-health, fuming against the idiocies of war and conveying its hectic horror in his iconic Merry-Go-Round of 1916. Carrington retreated to the country before returning to London. Nevinson joined the Quaker ambulance corps and then the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), drawing on his experience in widely acclaimed paintings that showed war as an inhuman, impersonal force.After serving in London, Paul Nash was sent to the Ypres trenches. He escaped briefly, through a lucky fall and broken rib, but returned as a war artist to make his angry, desolate sketches of war-torn landscapes, empty of men. Spencer, like Nevinson, joined the RAMC, leaving his painting, Swan Upping, unfinished at home. In 1916 he was sent to the Balkans, his first trip outside England, where he was entranced by the wild landscapes but still longed for the swans, the woods, and the sun casting shafts of light on the Thames. Towards the end of the conflict, he and his brother Gilbert, as well as Paul and John Nash, all worked as war artists.After 1919 the five artists never quite recaptured the inspired vigour of their early years. There were successes but also tragedies. Carrington killed herself shortly after Lytton Strachey's death in 1932, and in June 1939, Gertler gassed himself in his studio. Nevinson and Nash both died in 1946, still in their 50s. Spencer, the true hero of this book, achieved his dream of commemorating the war and the fallen in his paintings for a memorial chapel at Burghclere and saw his Resurrection sold to the Tate. He never really left his home, and when he died in December 1959 he left behind one unfinished masterpiece, Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta.Haycock's narrative of this entangled, war-defined group is so strong that it often has the force of a novel, hard to put down. But still one longs to see their work, and although there are some fine colour plates, inevitably one yearns for more pictures. Copious illustration is almost impossible for authors, since permissions are expensive, so perhaps we should call for a joint exhibition of the work of this group, to complement the moving portrayal of their lives in this engrossing and enjoyable book.Jenny Uglow's A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration is published by Faber.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Vinvent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble When I was a child, I knew that Van Gogh was the greatest painter who had ever lived. For years he blinded me to other artists. I have learned to admire Botticelli and Caravaggio and Ivon Hitchens, but in old age I am faithful to my earliest love. What Van Gogh did is, for me, what painting is. The eye sees, the hand obeys, the spirit flows into brush strokes, the world is recreated and revealed. As a child, I knew nothing of his long apprenticeship or his madness or his failures in the market place. Nobody told me. I saw nothing mad or tragic in his vision of the natural world. I saw intensity and a world of glory.We had prints of his work at home, one of them of the drawbridge at Langlois, which enthralled me. As a schoolgirl I bought postcards and posters, of irises and cypresses and starry nights and a yellow chair. They brought me immeasurable joy. I believed he looked into the heart of creation, with the eye of God, and what the Hubble telescope has seen confirms my belief. The glory exalted and blinded him. That is enough to make him heroic. He knew the mysteries of the cosmos.But he was, I discovered, more than a visionary. He was a hard-working, good-hearted man, who endured illness and public neglect with stoic patience, and showed a tender gratitude to those who cared for him. I have been reading the handsomely illustrated six-volume edition of his letters, which displays his wide reading, his warm and generous admiration for his fellow artists, his forlorn but unquestioning dedication to his work. The bravery with which he attempted to handle his mania in the asylum of St-Paul-de-Mausole is infinitely touching. He took pleasure in copying the work of Millet, Delacroix, Courbet, Rembrandt, and writes to his brother Theo that copying "teaches, and above all, consoles". This is the humility of greatness. The paintings of this period are astounding in their originality, but the copies are also wonderful. He is, with Shakespeare, beyond praise.Margaret DrabbleVan Goghguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Palin, Kennedy: Political reading from all sides Barack Obama's books have sold well. But by the fall, book buyers voted with their pocketbooks for two other big names in politics. rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Judith Kerr, talking tigers and tea The much beloved author of The Tiger Who Came to Tea and the Mog books, still going strong at 86, tells Alison Flood about her new bookJudith Kerr is blaming the rhymes. It's their fault, she says, that her latest picture book is somewhat surreal, featuring flying elephants, lions plucking rabbits from hats and a crocodile and a kangaroo setting off on a bicycle.Author of the much-loved children's picture books The Tiger Who Came to Tea and the Mog series, about a cat with a mind of its own, Kerr has taken a "quite different" approach for One Night in the Zoo. Speaking on the phone from her long-time home in Barnes, west London – she's lived there for more than 40 years – she says it's unlike anything she's done before."Whereas all the other books started with a story, this one started with an idea of pictures. I always say this and it sounds so pretentious – I love Chagall: there's absolutely nothing of him left in the book but that's where I started to think about it," she says. "And I wanted to do animals doing surreal things, really wild stuff ... I could see these images. It's never quite like what I've had in my head but the idea of doing these wild moonlit pictures – once I'd thought of it I had to do it."So she began with an elephant "who jumped in the air and flew". Coming up with a charmingly cheery elephant taking off against a purpling sky, she knew she was heading in the right direction when she risked showing the picture to her then seven-year-old grandson. "He looked at it and laughed and said 'elephants don't fly ... I think this is going to be a good one'. That was hugely encouraging, because it's quite hard to do, to have the picture in your head of some absurd narrative – you never quite get it as you want it. I was very pleased."Confident she was on the right path, the rhymes began to take hold. The crocodile – as gentle-looking as Kerr's better-known tiger, the one who came for tea – departs with the kangaroo on a bicycle made for two, "three lions did tricks which astonished a gnu [and] four bears cooked a squid and squidgeberry stew"."It rhymes, which makes it even more surreal, in a way. The rhyme leads to something you wouldn't otherwise get to," Kerr chuckles. "It was quite hard to find all these rhymes with 'oo'." She recites some of the book to me. "I've loved doing it," she says. "It's rather nice at my great age [she's 86] to do something different, something new."Despite Kerr's huge success (the Mog picture books and The Tiger Who Came to Tea have collectively sold more than 9m copies), this brand of gentle self-deprecation twists and twines its way through much of our conversation. Talking me through how she works – in a room at the top of her house, surrounded by books, she'll start around 10.30am and keep going as long as there's light – provided she's happy with what she's producing. "Sometimes I'm just producing rubbish so I have to stop. If it's not going well, I think 'why did I ever think I had talent?'"She worried terribly about the retrospective exhibition celebrating her life and work that launched late last year in Newcastle, at Seven Stories. "I was in a total tizz about it," she says. "They had all my stuff, and I thought, suppose they choose all the really dreadful ones – there are always some – and then suppose they enlarge them … Then I saw it and it was wonderful: so imaginative, beautifully done and very moving. There's a lot about my life – they've even got a photo of my father which I'd never seen."She is clearly moved by this. Her father, the German drama critic and writer Alfred Kerr, had a price on his head throughout the second world war for speaking out against the Nazi regime (his books were burned by the Nazis). Kerr was just nine years old when the family left Berlin in 1933, the day before the authorities came to arrest them; they passed through Switzerland and France before settling in England in 1936. Kerr wrote about the experience in her vivid, child's-eye memoir, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit."I remember saying to my father a very long time ago, 'I want to draw – that's what I want to do'. He said, you have to be very very good, because they're very very good in this country," she remembers. Initially, therefore, she took a job in television, which she left to have children. Her first book, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, started life as a story she would tell her two-year-old daughter at bedtime. "She wanted it again and again – although I tried others, that was the one she liked. I kept telling it and telling it until it was totally solid in my head," she says. "But I didn't think of doing anything until almost five years later when the children [she also has a son, the novelist Matthew Kneale] were at school. Then I had the day free from nine to three, and I could do something about it."She showed The Tiger Who Came to Tea to the publisher Collins who, to her amazement, agreed to publish it. The Mog series, too, was drawn from her home life – an amalgamation of the silly antics of the family's cats. "[The original] Mog didn't miaow; she thought the children were making so much noise it wasn't necessary. Instead, she'd make terrible faces outside when she couldn't use the cat flap. So the first Mog book was all about the things she did," she says. "I hadn't meant to do any more Mog books, but we kept getting more cats – the children wanted kittens. And they all started doing odd things. One was afraid of heights and got stuck on the roof, another was frightened of the Christmas tree ... They're very funny creatures. My present one goes for walks with me."More than 40 years after her enigmatically smiling tiger first captured the imaginations of the nation's children, Kerr insists that she's "still very surprised it worked out like this". "My practical brother and mother were very worried about me – I never had any money and always looked awful," she remembers. "I think an awful lot of it is down to my husband [the late Nigel Kneale, scriptwriter and creator of Quatermass]. I was painting and got the odd prize, but it was a bit of a slog. Once I met him, everything fell into place. He encouraged me always, made me feel I was alright. I don't know if I would ever have done anything much if it hadn't been for him. He was a terrific help, a great delight."Kneale, known by the family as Tom, died in 2006, and his loss is obviously still raw. As a result, Kerr has thrown herself into work, and hates not having something lined up to do. "When I did the last little bit of One Night in the Zoo I panicked," she says. "I thought 'now what? What am I going to do next?' I don't think I minded when Tom was alive; it was nice not to be working for a little while, particularly if he wasn't – we'd go out and do things together. But now I'm on my own I hate not working."So she's already two-thirds of the way through a new book – due out in 2011 – about an old lady. "It's ridiculous, too, but a little more about something – for children, but maybe of interest to old ladies, too, I suppose," she says, before ending with a typically Kerr-ian piece of diffidence: "I hope I live long enough to see it published."Children and teenagersAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |