Augustus John (135 page)

9
  James Bone ‘The Tendencies of Modern Art’
Edinburgh Review
(April 1913),
pp. 420–34. Collected in
Post-Impressionists in England – The Critical Reception
(ed. J. B. Bullen 1988), pp. 433–47·

10
  Frances Spalding
Vanessa Bell
p. 109.

11
  Vanessa Bell to Margery Snowden, 21 October 1908.
Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell
(ed. Regina Marler 1993), p. 75.

12
  Laurence Binyon ‘Post-Impressionists’
Saturday Review
(12 November 1910), pp. 609–10.

13
  ‘The Autumn Salon’
The Times
(2 October 1908), p. 8.

14
  Frances Spalding
Vanessa Bell
p. 93.

15
  Frank Rutter ‘An Art Causerie’
Sunday Times
(10 November 1912), p. 19.

16
  Roger Fry ‘A Postscript on Post-Impressionism’
Nation
(24 December 1910).

17
  Grey Gowrie ‘The Twentieth Century’
The Genius of British Painting
(ed. David Piper 1975), p. 302.

18
  
Pall Mall Gazette
(25 November 1912).

19
  In a letter dated March 1909 to Florence Beerbohm. David Cecil Transcripts, Merton College, Oxford.

‘Max has done a very funny caricature of me – dozens of awful art students in the background,’ Augustus wrote to Dorelia. Besides ‘Insecurity’ (now owned by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne), Sir Rupert Hart-Davis has ‘run to earth’ another five Beerbohm caricatures.

20
  Max Beerbohm to Florence Beerbohm, 22 May 1909.

21
  ‘In the Fair Women Show, by the way, John has a portrait in oils – a full length – of “A Smiling Woman” – which seems to me really great – quite apart from and above anything else there; and you behold in me a convert.’ Max to Florence Beerbohm, March 1909.

22
  Paul Nash
Outline
(1949), p. 7.

23
  C. R. W. Nevinson
Paint and Prejudice
(1937), p. 189.

24
  
Saturday Review
(7 December 1907), pp. 694–5.

25
  
Magazine of Fine Arts
(May-August 1906).

26
  Quoted by David Piper in
Augustus John – the pattern of the painter’s career,
BBC Third Programme (15 April 1954).

27
  Richard Shone
Bloomsbury Portraits
(1993 edn), p. 61.

28
  See
Sunday Times
(1 December 1912),
Daily Chronicle
(26 November 1912),
Spectator
(30 November 1912),
Manchester Guardian
(25 November 1912),
Daily Mail
(23 November 1912),
Observer
(24 November 1912),
The Times
(23 November 1912).

29
  See John Woodeson ‘Mark Gertler. A Survey’ (1971).

30
  Simon Watney
English Post-Impressionism
(1980), p. 21.

31
  ‘The Academy in Totalitaria’
Art News Annual
(1967).

32
  
Burlington Magazine
Volume XV No. 73 (April 1909), p. 17.

33
  John Rothenstein
Modern English Painters
Volume I,
Sickert to Grant
(rev. edn 1962), p. 207.

34
  
Augustus John – the pattern of the painter’s career
,
BBC Third Programme (15 April 1954).

35
  
Saturday Review
(10 December 1910), p. 747.

36
  
Pall Mall Gazette
(11 December 1910).

37
  
The Queen
(10 December 1910).

38
  
Daily Graphic
(10 December 1910).

39
  
Burlington Magazine
(February 1910), p. 267.

40
  It is this shared discovery, as well as his own independence, that Augustus signified in a letter to Quinn (10 February 1911): ‘I don’t think we need Fry’s lead: he’s a gifted obscurantist and no doubt has his uses in the world. He is at any rate alive to unrecognised possibilities and guesses at all sorts of wonderful things.’ Elsewhere in this letter he writes: ‘If you sent him [Fry] a gilded turd in a glass case he would probably discover some strange poignant
rhythm in it and hail you as a cataclysmic genius and persuade the Contemporary Art Society to buy the production for the Nation.’

41
  He had also recommended Mark Gertler’s early work – which hung alongside his own at the Chenil Gallery – but by 16 February 1916 he is telling Quinn that ‘Gertler’s work has gone to buggery and I can’t stand it. Not that he hasn’t ability of a sort and all the cheek of a Yid, but the spirit of the work is false and affected.’

With Eric Gill it was the other way about. On 10 February 1911, he is advising Quinn against buying his work. ‘Personally I don’t admire the things and feel pretty certain that you wouldn’t neither. I admit that Gill is an enterprising young man and not without ability. He has been a carver of inscriptions till quite recently when he started doing figures. His knowledge of human form is, you may be sure, of the slightest and I feel strongly that his experience of human beings is anything but profound. I know him personally. He carves well and succeeds in expressing one or two cut-and-dried philosophical ideas. He is much impressed by the importance of copulation possibly because he has had so little to do with that subject in practice, and apparently considers himself obliged to announce the gospel of the flesh, to a world that doesn’t need it. Innes calls him “the naughty schoolmaster”, Gore calls him the “precious cockney” and I call him the “artist of the Urinal”… I’ll let you know when I see a thing of Gill’s which I can really respect and desire. His present things are taking at first glance as they look so simple and unsophisticated – but, to me at least, only art at first glance.’ As Fiona MacCarthy remarks in her biography of Gill (1989), ‘For Augustus John to claim crassly that Gill was impressed by the importance of copulation because he had so little to do with it in practice was to misread Gill’s whole outlook.’ But three years later his opinion of Gill’s work had risen. ‘I also ordered you one of Gill’s things, a dancing figure in stone,’ he wrote to Quinn (26 January 1914). ‘…Gill has made good progress and his things are admirable now, both in workmanship and idea.’

42
  Gwen John to Augustus n.d.
(c.
1909–10). NLW MS 22782D fols. 29–30.

43
  John Currie, who appears as ‘Logan’ in Gilbert Cannan’s novel
Mendel
(1916), shot himself and his mistress in a fit of jealousy. ‘You remember Currie, some of whose works you bought?’ Augustus asked Quinn (10 October 1914). ‘He shot his mistress dead yesterday and then himself. He has since died of four bullet wounds in the chest. The girl [Dolly Henry] was staying here [Alderney Manor] lately carrying on a futile love affair with another young man. We all got sick of her. She was an attractive girl or used to be when I knew her first, but seemed to have deteriorated into a deceitful little bitch.

‘It is a terrible affair and it’s a good thing I suppose that Currie died. He was an able fellow and would have had a successful career.’ Augustus’s portrait of Dolly Henry (sometimes called O’Henry) is in the South African National Gallery at Cape Town, entitled ‘The Woman in Green’. The gallery also owns his portrait of Wilson Steer’s most celebrated sitter, Rose Pettigrew.

44
  Spencer Gore, whose work Augustus recommended to Quinn as ‘good and promising’. In 1928
(Vogue
,
25 July) he wrote: ‘The work of Spencer F. Gore, although [attracting] the admiration of a small body of genuine picture-lovers, undoubtedly failed to reach its deserved favour with the general public on account of the war following so soon after his death, which befell when he might be said to have arrived at the prime of his accomplishment. But this unconscious injustice was repaired by the April [1928] exhibition [at the Leicester Galleries], when it was realised that Gore was one of the most notable landscape painters of his time.’ And again in 1942
(Horizon
Volume VI No. 36, December 1942, p. 426) he wrote: ‘The industrious apprentice is a type to be admired rather than loved. In Spencer Gore’s case, however, immense industry was coupled not only with a rare and ever-ripening talent;
he possessed in addition an amiable, modest and upright nature which elicited the deep affection and respect of all those who knew him.’

45
  ‘He [Greaves] is a real artist-kid, with Chelsea in his brain. I shall never cease to appreciate his work –
so
unlike Whistler’s at bottom.’ John to Quinn, 17 May 1912.

46
  On 19 December 1913, Augustus had written to Quinn urging him to buy a Bomberg drawing, ‘extremely good and dramatic representing a man dead with mourning family, very simplified and severe. I’ld like you to have it.’ Quinn bought it for fifteen pounds (equivalent to £670 in 1996).

47
  
Vogue,
11 January 1928, ‘The Paintings of Evan Walters’; 7 March, ‘The Unknown Artist’; 18 April, ‘The Woman Artist’; 27 June, ‘Paris and the Painter’; 25 July, ‘Three English Artists’; 22 August, ‘Some Contemporary French Painters’; 3 September, ‘Five Modern Artists’; 31 October, ‘Interior Decoration’. The series was originally intended to comprise twelve articles but, even with the help of T. W. Earp, Augustus did not get beyond eight.

48
  Arnold Bennett
The Pretty Lady
(1918).

49
  Frank Rutter
Since I Was Twenty-five
(1927), pp. 191–2.

50
  He was, however, elected with Oscar Kokoschka and Jack Yeats as an honorary member of the London Group in the Second World War.

51
  Roger Fry to Will Rothenstein, 28 March 1911.
The Letters of Roger Fry
(ed. Denys Sutton) Volume I (1972), p. 344.

52
  27 July 1920. See
The Letters of Roger Fry
Volume II (1972), p. 486.

53
  See Mary Lago
Imperfect Encounter
pp. 10–13.

54
  The Library, King’s College, Cambridge.

55
  ‘Seriousness’ by Clive Bell,
New Statesman and Nation,
4 June 1938, pp. 952–3. ‘If only Augustus John had been serious what a fine painter he might have been… in my opinion “the latest paintings of Augustus John” at Tooth’s gallery in Bond Street are almost worthless.

‘They are not serious: in the strict sense of the word they are superficial. The painter accepts a commonplace view and renders it with a thoughtless gesture. And even that gesture is not sustained… the picture crumbles into nothingness. Nothingness: at least I can find nothing beneath the general effect… there is less talent than trick; and there is no thought at all… the master has preferred carelessly to dash on the canvas a brushful of colour which at most indicates a fact of no aesthetic importance...’

Elsewhere in the article, which refers to John’s talent, charm, personal beauty, detestation of humbug and, perhaps optimistically, his sense of decency and magnanimity, and calls him ‘a national monument’, his work is unfavourably compared to that of Paul Nash, Xavier Roussel and Claire Bertrand.

56
  Roger Fry to Jean Marchand, 19 December 1921.
The Letters of Roger Fry
Volume II p. 519. ‘I do not exactly find him [Clive Bell] spiteful. He hasn’t much personal judgement and he’s a terrible snob… it is not by personal antipathy that he castigates a painter but rather by his over-preoccupation to show himself in the forefront of the trend. And since he is an admirable journalist and expresses himself forcefully he inflicts much distress without exactly meaning to.’ Later in this letter, Fry suggests that Bell was not fundamentally a ‘serious’ art critic – ‘he does not make a serious effort to understand it but collects hearsay and remarks from other artists etc.’

57
  S. K. Tillyard
The Impact of Modernism
(1988), pp. 182–3.

58
  ‘J. Dickson Innes’, an unpublished essay by Augustus John (formerly owned by William Gaunt).

59
  Information from Charles Hampton, to whom I am indebted for many facts concerning Innes’s career.

60
  Augustus John ‘Fragment of an Autobiography’,
Horizon
Volume XI No. 64 (April 1945), p. 25.

61
  
Randolph Schwabe ‘Reminiscences of Fellow Students’
Burlington Magazine
(January 1943), p. 6.

62
  
Modern English Painters
Volume II
Innes to Moore
(1962), p. 25.

63
  Introduction to Catalogue of ‘J. D. Innes Exhibition’, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, 1961.

64
  Augustus John to John Quinn, 10 February 1911. Quinn bought four of Innes’s watercolours.

65
  Rough draft for his Introduction to the Catalogue of the Innes exhibition of 1923 at the Chenil Gallery.

66
  The cairn was destroyed by a USAAF Flying Fortress bomber that crashed on the peak of Arenig Fawr in 1946.

67
  
Horizon
Volume XV No. 64 (April 1945), p. 255.

68
  William Gaunt holograph
loc. cit.

69
  ‘Some Miraculous Promised Land. J. D. Innes, Augustus John and Derwent Lees in North Wales 1910–13’. Mostyn Art Gallery, Llandudno, 1982.

70
  ‘The Late J. D. Innes. A Short Appreciation’ by Augustus John, ARA.

71
  For a Derwent Lees ‘John’ see ‘The Round Tree’ at the Aberdeen Art Gallery, which may be compared with John’s own ‘Gypsy in the Sandpit’ at the same gallery.

72
  ‘My immense picture of Ottoline is to begin: so my respiration may be audible in Dorset.’ Henry Lamb to Lytton Strachey, 10 April 1910.

73
  Boris Anrep recorded this first encounter with Augustus (in a letter to Henry Lamb) thus: ‘If you could creep in my heart and memory which you honoured by some particulars of your relation to John’s – you would feel sike and poisoned by the byle which turns round in me when I first saw John. That was a night-mare, with all appreciation of his powerful and mighty dreadedness, and some ghotic beaty, I could not keep down my heat to some beastly and cruel and vulgar look of brightness which I perceived in his face and demeanour...’ Augustus relished Anrep’s personality and admired his work. In 1913 he persuaded Knewstub to arrange an exhibition of Anrep’s drawings at the Chenil Gallery, and in later years put him in the way of several commissions, from Lady Tredegar and others, for his mosaics.