Augustus John (67 page)

The oil sketches at the Chenil Gallery revealed, for the first time, a gift for colour. The pale hills of Provence with their olives and pines and their elusive skies, the summer light across the Étang mysteriously moving with sun and shade, seemed to have brought Augustus into a more vivid contact with nature. These figures or groups of figures reflect life as in a ballet – the girl on the sea’s edge poised like some dancer, her hand on the barre of the horizon. The colour is clear and untroubled, brushed on with hasty decision – there is no niggling detail: they are austere, these panels, and often shamelessly unfinished. ‘The technique appears to be, at its simplest, to make a pencil drawing on a small board covered with colourless transparent priming,’ commented David Piper; ‘then the outlines are washed in with a generous brush loaded with pure and brilliant oil colour – and there’s a happy illogicality about it, for the lines of the drawing… are those of any John drawing, subtly lapping and rounding the volume they conjure up, but they are obliterated by the oils, and the result for effect relies on the inscape of vivid colour, on contrasting colour, and the broad flattened simplified pattern.’
34

Never in his work had the tension between dream and reality, the ideal and the actual, been presented so lyrically by means so simple; never had the content been raised so free of a mere imitation of nature. John has no message for us. A painter, he told John Freeman, ‘leaves his emotion behind so that people can share it’. The emotion in these pictures comes from the choreography and reflected light, from a sense of volume and outline. His method seemed far removed from the ordinary language of British art, and critics argued that he was using a curious shorthand. The
most appreciative was the poet and dramatist Laurence Binyon, who had recently been appointed Assistant Keeper in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. ‘Somehow everything lives,’ he wrote after seeing this Chenil Gallery exhibition.

‘Even the paint, rudely dashed on the canvas, seems to be rebelling into beauties of its own. Mr John tries to disguise his science and his skill, but it leaks out, it is there… I do not know how it is, but these small studies, some of them at least, make an extraordinary impression and haunt one’s memory. A tall woman leaning on a staff; a little boy in scarlet on a cliff-edge against blue sea; a woman carrying bundles of lavender: the description of these says nothing, but they themselves seem creatures of the infancy of the world, aboriginals of the earth, with an animal dignity and strangeness, swift of gesture, beautifully poised. That is the secret of Mr John’s power. He is limited, obsessed by a few types… his ideas are few… But in it there is a jet of elemental energy, something powerful and unaccountable, like life itself.’
35

In the course of this review Binyon compared these Provençal Studies to the brilliant colour and simplified form of Gauguin. Other critics compared this new work to that of Matisse,
36
Van Gogh
37
and Jules Flandrin,
38
all of whom were then exhibiting at the Grafton Gallery. The coincidence points to a parallel development in the minds of John and Roger Fry. In the month that John first saw the wall paintings of Luca Signorelli, Fry was writing of Signorelli as ‘one of the family of the great audacious masters’.
39
The names of both Fry and John had, in the past, been primarily associated with those of the Old Masters. What they believed they had discovered was the
modernity
of certain Old Masters, such as Masaccio and Signorelli. Their enthusiasm for modern French painters sprang from their new understanding of the Italian Primitives.

John thought of Fry as a powerful writer, a disappointing artist and a man of credulous disposition who had nevertheless discovered ‘wonderful things’. It was, as Quentin Bell wrote, ‘remarkable’ for a man of Fry’s temperament and training to have realized that ‘Cézanne and his followers were not simply innovators but represented also a return to the great tradition of the past, for such a conviction, which does not seem wonderful to-day, required an extraordinary effort of the mind in the year 1910’. It was perhaps even more remarkable that Augustus John should independently have guessed at a similar connection at the same time.
40

‘I seem to find I can paint better in France – and I meet a few people after my own heart.’

Augustus John to John Sampson (September 1919)

‘It is good for him [Augustus] to be over here and meet such different people… I don’t want to see any English pictures again except those by 2 or 3 artists.’

Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt (February 1918)

‘A bloody show!’ John’s words, reverberating down the decades, have been hailed as the first cry of the future Royal Academician.

He did say them – to Eric Gill who reported them by letter to Will Rothenstein. They represented his first reaction, not so much to the pictures themselves but to the chatter and outcry that rose from the first Post-Impressionist exhibition. From this time on he was to become increasingly touchy about publicity. It seems certain, from the date Gill must have written to Rothenstein, that Augustus had denounced the exhibition before going to see it. Certainly his first sight of it was distorted by all he had heard and read which, like a film, seemed to come between him and what he saw. He did not visit the Grafton until the show had been running a month. ‘There is a show of “Post-Impressionists” now on here,’ he noted in a letter to Quinn (December 1910), ‘and my post-impression of it is by no means favourable.’ That was all. Perhaps he was fearful of Quinn transferring his agency fees to Fry. However, in the last week of the exhibition, when the noise had died down, he went again. His opinion of the pictures is set out in a long letter to Quinn (11 January 1911).

‘I went to the “Post-Impressionists” again yesterday and was more powerfully impressed by them than I was at my first visit. There have been a good many additions made to the show in the meanwhile – and important ones. Several new paintings and drawings by Van Gogh served to convince me that this man was a great artist. My first view of his works disappointed and disagreed with me. I do not think however that one need expect to be at once charmed and captured by a personality so remarkable as his. Indeed “charm” is the last thing to talk about in regard to Van Gogh. The drawings I saw of his were splendid and there is a stunning portrait of himself. Gauguin too has been reinforced and I admired enormously
two Maori women in a landscape. As for Matisse, I regard him with the utmost suspicion. He is what the French call a fumiste – a charlatan, but an ingenious one. He has a portrait here of a “woman with green eyes” which to me is devoid of every genuine quality – vulgar and spurious work. While in Paris the other day I saw a show of paintings by Picasso which struck me as wonderfully fine – full of secret beauty of sentiment – I have admired his work for long… I forgot to mention
Cézanne –
he was a splendid fellow, one of the greatest – he too has work at the Grafton.’

It would take another ten years for him to come round to Matisse. Meanwhile he helped Quinn to buy a Gauguin ceiling (July 1913), and recommended (3 December 1912) work by Manet and Degas. He also wrote about the work of Maurice Denis and others (17 May 1912):

‘I think Denis has a certain talent… I think him an intelligent, ingenious, and sincere man who makes the most of his gifts within the contemporary field. He is not, in my opinion, great by any means. Picasso now has genius, albeit perhaps of a morbid sort…

I wish we had gone to see Anquetin while in Paris. A man of immense gifts. Bye-the-bye if you come across a painting by Daumier, freeze on to it! One of the great Frenchmen. El Greco too is now coming into his own. A terrible, mysterious Spaniard – or rather Greek.’

He was interested by his British contemporaries too, writing copiously about their work to Quinn so that, in this way, he could help them without reprisals of gratitude. Such methods appealed alike to his generosity and secretiveness, and accurately reflected his attitudes from 1910 into the 1920s. For himself he bought work by, among others, Epstein, Wyndham Lewis, William Roberts and Christopher Wood. But about Ricketts and Shannon, artists who seemed to have more in common with himself (such as a reverence for Puvis de Chavannes), he was lukewarm: ‘I have never succeeded in feeling or showing any great interest in
his
[Shannon’s] work tho’ I have remarked that personally he shows himself a man, one would say, of character,’ he wrote to Quinn on 25 August 1910. ‘He has a reserve which contrasts with the funny effervescence of Ricketts – who is the cleverer chap; but as for him, he has lost his innocence, he is corrupt… A man of his intellectual parts should keep himself straighter – at the risk of being stupid even.’
41

Quinn relied on Augustus for information about contemporary British art. The first artist he recommended was Gwen who, like himself, was absorbing aspects of Post-Impressionism into her work, flattening the
contours, emphasizing surface pattern. He was concerned, not about her artistic reputation, which was secure in his eyes, but her economic survival and her morale. ‘I am touched by your gentle solicitude,’ she told him in 1910. ‘I think it would be wise to shake off this funeste fatigue.’
42

In her dealings with Quinn, Gwen is in many respects the reverse of her brother. From Quinn’s point of view, it was like looking towards their pictures through opposite ends of a telescope: his so awfully near, hers infinitely distant. Yet he was not a man to give up. He began in 1909 by offering her thirty pounds (equivalent to £1,400 in 1996) for any picture she cared to send him, and when that failed he paid her in advance and arranged for her to have an annual stipend. He badgered and bullied her until she felt breathless. After eight years of financial support he possessed only four of her paintings; after more than twelve years he owned six paintings and a few drawings. She was an extraordinary challenge to him, but he persevered, and eventually succeeded in buying almost every picture she sold. She thought him acquisitive and domineering, and ‘he bores me’. Yet his patience, financial generosity, genuine interest and enduring encouragement stimulated her and during a period of six months in the last year of his life she sent him half a dozen paintings and five drawings. Meanwhile, watching their negotiations anxiously from the sidelines, Augustus continued counselling Gwen to retain Quinn’s goodwill, while triumphantly forfeiting it himself.

He recommended work by John Currie,
43
Epstein and Jacob Kramer, the early paintings of Mark Gertler and the later carvings of Eric Gill, as well as pictures by Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner, Spencer Gore,
44
Derwent Lees, C. R. W. Nevinson, Wilson Steer and Walter Greaves.
45
Often he would write enthusiastically about painters working in styles very different from his own. Alvaro (‘Chile’) Guevara he described as ‘the most gifted and promising of them all’ (16 February 1916), but he was also impressed by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska who, he wrote (3 April 1915), ‘is a man of talent. His things look as if they have been sat on before they got quite hard. Some of them look like bits of stalactite roughly resembling human forms. But they are wittily conceived.’ Most of all he wrote about David Bomberg. ‘You ought to get more Bombergs,’ he advised Quinn
46
(26 January 1914), ‘he is full of talent.’ Following the lead of Marinetti, the initiator of Futurism – ‘a common type of the meridional; naif, earnest, and ignorant. But we are very friendly’ – Bomberg’s painting took a course that was ultimately unsympathetic to Augustus. But, with reservations, he continued to praise him (in company with ‘another Futurist called Giacomo Balla who is good’) – singling out his famous ‘Mud-Bath’.

There is no mention of Bomberg in
Chiaroscuro
or in
Finishing Touches,
the two autobiographical volumes Augustus wrote late in his life; and
almost none of the other artists upon whose behalf he had secretly exercised himself. He took to writing only in his early sixties at the end of the 1930s, and, by the time his fragments of autobiography were put together as books in the 1950s and early 1960s, he was distrustful of his own spasms of generosity, and no longer interested in the unfamiliar. Of Picasso, for example, he wrote: ‘Such ceaseless industry, leading to a torrent of
articles de nouveauté
,
may seem to some, capricious and rootless, but it undoubtedly deserves its reward in the greatest snob-following of our time’ – a sentence that was rewarded by Picasso’s classification of Augustus as: ‘The best bad painter in Britain’.

It can therefore be misleading to reconstruct the young man from what was written by the disaffected older man. As a guide to his artistic taste, there exist eight long articles
47
he wrote for
Vogue
in 1928 on modern French and English painters. These articles demonstrate how catholic and near-contemporary his taste remained until his fifties – though he had grown resentful of the power of fashion in art, for which he blamed the dealers. The value of the French tradition, which depended upon ‘the unceasing enthusiasm of French painters towards a personal expression’, was beyond fashion. Those French painters he pointed to as having created a climate favouring innovation were Manet, Monet (‘in the entrancing waterlilies of his later years’), Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro – ‘these are the pioneers who led painting from the halting deliberation of David to the courageous or even risky contact with the open air. Monet, Renoir, Degas not tentatively, but with conscious authority, released that long-confined expression of instant response to the aspect of the visible world.’ The battle of the Impressionists had long ago been fought and won, but he deplored the labelling of Post-Impressionism applied to the later Van Gogh, Gauguin and Émile Bernard because ‘their work and their own individuality was much more significant than, and much more distinct from, the work of the Impressionists themselves.’ After Gauguin and Van Gogh, the next painters in the grand line of French art were rather less to his liking. The atmosphere had become too cultured. He praises, with reservations, the work of that ‘lazy giant’ Derain, but deprecates his pedantry; while the developments since 1912 in the styles of Picasso and Matisse seem to have reversed his attitude to them. Picasso, whose Blue and Rose periods he had loved, appeared to be growing metaphorically false. ‘Matisse remains the best, the most sensitive, of French painters, for Matisse having abandoned his early essays in imbecility, has by dint of assiduity and method achieved the foremost place in his generation as an exquisite paysagist and painter of
genre.
’