I wonder how often Walter Richard Sickert and James Ensor
have been considered alongside each other; true they are not so far apart in
terms of history (they were both born in 1860 and lived until the late 1940s),
and true Sickert spent some time in France in the 1900s before returning home
to produce the controversial works of contemporary London, but it was not until
I stumbled across Ensor’s La Dame en
détresse (1882) in the Musee D’Orsay that I recognised a potential for visual
comparison between the production of the two artists.
At face value this is to be found in similarities of
subject: La Dame en Détresse portrays
a woman collapsed on a bed, with curtains closed and details of her person masked
by the manner of painting. This subject immediately conjures the association of
Sickert’s Camden Town series, a set
of works which give account of a very particular incident.
Walter Richard Sickert was a British artist trained by James
McNeill Whistler, who had encouraged him to travel to Paris. Whilst there he
became fascinated with the force of Modernism, as exemplified in the work of
Edouard Manet and the biting realism of Edgar Degas. Returning home to London in
1905 Sickert found it a centre for a similar cultural Modernity to that which
he had encountered in Paris, and to which the French artists were so
brilliantly responding. In line with Charles Baudelaire’s The Heroes of the Basement Sickert lived a working class life in
Camden Town, and he chose the working class people over the bourgeois as his
subjects. However, this decision was not quite as refreshing as one might first
think; what Sickert delighted in was the vulgarity of this life; he does not
paint ordinary life in order to dignify or monumentalise it, he is simply
fascinated by the grim details of the ordinary existence.
This vulgarity reaches their extremes in the Camden Town
Murder paintings. The brutal murder of a young woman called Emily Dimmock – who
sometimes made ends meet through prostitution – shook the general public and
became a piece of fascination for the popular press. The memory of Jack the
Ripper’s savage crimes were still present in people’s consciousness, and in
no-one’s more than Sickert who had always been obsessed with these murders.
Dimmock became a kind of perverse muse for him. He rented the rooms in which
she had been killed, and even hired the defendant in the case after he had been
acquitted to pose as a model for his paintings. These paintings are comparable
to CSI: each item in the room is placed there for some reason. In each work he
reconstructs the murder scene placing a different emphasis or interpretation on
the event; his muse takes on the role of victim or whore.
Taking Camden Town
Affair (1909) as an example, Sickert turns a work which initially seems to
present a nude asleep into something more aggressive by the confrontational
placing of the viewer within the scene. We stand at the end of her bed, viewing
the women in a way which not only distorts the appearance of the body through
the foreshortening, but also accents her sexualised areas. Sickert helps this
along by highlighting these areas with touches of lightness. The nudity of this
woman is not remotely desirable or erotic, rather her naked state emphasises
her vulnerability. The shadowy figure of a man fully clothed by her bedside
accents this vulnerability whilst also placing us as the viewer in an
uncomfortable position; why are we privy to this scene? And is it possible that
we are the ones who threaten the vulnerable woman?
Walter Sickert, Camden Town Affair, 1909
Of course to the informed viewer this woman is not sleeping.
The distortion of the woman’s limbs give this away; her positioning is not one
which anyone would naturally lie, whether awake or asleep. This arrangement
testifies to the struggle of defence which concluded with her loss of life.
This struggle is communicated in the painting of the room. While in one way the
scene radiates silence, the surroundings – the bed, the floor, the walls –
scream out the drama which they have witnessed. Sickert’s brushwork on the
sheets of the bed is erratic and disturbing; the floor colour is clearly
painted over black as if trying to cover over the horrific secret.
This was an unsolved murder trial, only the physical setting
of the room could testify to the identity of the murderer.
As the title suggests, Ensor’s subject is not a corpse.
Though her form is limp and passive, we are told that she is ‘A Woman in
Distress’. Rather than testifying to a physical crime, this scene seeks to present
an internal turmoil.
James Ensor, La Dame en détresse, 1882
While Sickert played upon the obsession with crimes of the
popular press, Ensor chose to present Modernity is quite a different way. As an
artist he is well known for his masked caricatures of crowded groups. There
were various theories which were popularised in the second half of the 19th
century concerning the impact of the urban environment on Mental Wealth; these
included Georg Simmel’s The Metropolis
and Mental Life (1902-3) as well as the theories of behaviour within crowds
by Gustave Le Bon and Sigmund Freud. Ensor plays upon these theories in his
art. In Self Portrait with Masks
(1899) he relays the loneliness and claustrophobia of the individual within the
city crowds by filling the space with dehumanised forms of people; the
extremism of these beings suffocates the realism of the artist’s own portrait
in the centre of the work.
James Ensor, Self-Portrait with Masks, 1899
All this made it surprising to find a work so seemingly ‘conservative’
as this one. However, as with Sickert’s work, it is the subtleties of the painting
which when revealed make it so disturbing. A close inspection of the
iconography reveals ghoulish faces hidden across the painting: in the
bed-knobs, the curtain ties, the carvings of the bed. These mystical clues
indicate how we should read the interior scene we see.
Several Symbolist artists were interested in the
representation of urban anxieties through the analogy of the interior of a room
and the interior of a mind. Vilhelm Hammershoi is one such example of this; his
empty interiors often include a single figure with her face obscured, and all
the routes of escape from the space are blocked. In Woman Reading the lines of perspective of the object in the room
are exaggerated to a vanishing point by the woman’s head, thereby directly
referencing her psychological character, and the door is closed in on us so the
only space we are aware of is the one room. The suggestion is that this woman
in some way feels trapped within her mind, isolated from the world by her
invisibility within the urban environment.
Vilhelm Hammershoi, Woman Reading, 1908
It is likely that this is just what Ensor looks to achieve
in La Dame en détresse. We notice
that the curtains are closed upon her, and where they are open we are not
permitted any view of the world beyond. The title claims that this woman is in
‘distress’ but the woman herself is passive and still – the active angst of the
work is to be found in the enclosure of the darkened bedroom. The figure of the
woman herself is almost formless: her body has collapsed completely into the
bed so, were it not for the colour of her clothing, we might not be able to
distinguish her form. The subject is not aware of her physical self within the
Modern city: the contemporary fashion which she wears which might bring her a sense
of belonging is dematerialised and instead we see only the internal feelings of
being haunted by urban anxieties which threaten that sense of belonging.
The comparison of these works reveals a commentary on the
modern woman in the urban environment at the turn of the century, but the most
interesting aspect of both these works is both artist’s choice to present the
woman within the private space of her bedroom. It is here that the woman is
most vulnerable, either through her physical or emotional exposure; the viewer
is permitted an intimacy with the subject in both scenes which is distinctly
unnerving. In this way, both Ensor and Sickert prove themselves to be truly
Modernist.
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