The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives Page 8

  The story is familiar now, but it was significant at the time of Wood’s early formation as an artist. The show, entitled ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’, was mounted by Roger Fry in November 1910. The principal exhibitors were Cézanne (21 pictures), Gauguin (36) and Van Gogh (22). There were also eight paintings by Vlaminck, three by Derain, two by Picasso, and three paintings and three sculptures by Matisse. It was England’s first full-frontal view of the new French art and the response was seismic.

  Pornography…the work of lunatics… a practical joke…of no interest except to the student of pathology: these were the reactions not of the editorial column of the Morning Post but of professional painters and liberal critics. Paul Nash recalled that the exhibition ‘seemed literally to bring about a national upheaval’. His own teacher at the Slade told the students that although he could not prevent them going to the Grafton galleries, he would much rather they stayed away. And these were not the canvases of Rothko or Jackson Pollock, not bricks or found objects, not action paintings, pickled sheep or used sanitary towels: these were figurative paintings – Matisse and Derain in their Fauvist period, Picasso at his most sweetly lyrical, Gauguin and Van Gogh in the popular colours that are today on sale as birthday cards even in the post offices and gift shops of Huyton.

  The public of all countries was slow to accept the new painting of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The French reviled the Impressionists and the Fauvists (literally ‘Wild Beasts’). The response of the United States to the Armory Show in 1913, when it was given its first view of modern European art, was also hysterical: the Illinois senatorial vice commission mounted an inquiry; Matisse was moved to tell an American interviewer: ‘Please tell the American people that I am a devoted husband and father, with a comfortable home and a fine garden, just like any man.’

  The difference in England was that it was not just the public that was outraged; it was the artists. They proved it by turning their back on Modernism until it was almost a quarter of a century old. Roger Fry’s second Post-Impressionist exhibition in London two years later was dominated by Matisse and Picasso, but also included some paintings by English artists. This may have been intended to show that the new art had ‘taken’ in England, but the quality of English paintings was inferior. Sickert’s influence declined after the first show, and while Fry’s Omega Workshops provided a focus for the avant-garde, the body of English painters had looked the other way.

  The exceptions were singular. Wyndham Lewis showed the influence of Parisian Cubism only four years after Picasso had painted ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’, usually cited as the first Cubist picture. Lewis was also abreast of the Italian Futurist movement, and even anticipated it in such paintings as ‘Smiling Woman Ascending a Stair’. Jacob Epstein studied in Paris from 1902 to 1905. He kept pace with Modigliani and Brancusi and arguably outstripped them both in his dramatic ‘Rock Drill’ in 1913. But Epstein was sui generis; he was also, like Britain’s foremost Modernist poet, T.S. Eliot, an American.

  By the time Christopher Wood emigrated to Paris at the age of nineteen, the direction of painting and sculpture had been changed by the War. Wood’s own ‘War years’ were what gave him the time and the urgent desire to be a painter; but for the artistic generation before him, the experience of the War itself had two devastating effects. In France it drove many of the most experimental artists back on themselves; and in England it cut off the first attempts, notably those made by Wyndham Lewis, to build bridges across the Channel.

  David Bomberg, a student at the Slade, had done what Wood did as early as 1913. He went to Paris and met Derain, Picasso and Modigliani; he picked up some of the rush and clamour of Futurism and showed elements of Cubism in his pictures. But when the war came and he was asked to depict the work of a Canadian tunnelling company, his pictures were rejected. Only when he redid them in a traditional style did they find favour, and he never resumed his pre-War experiments. C. R. W. Nevinson, also strongly Futurist in style before the War, struggled to express the flesh-and-blood aspect of what he saw in such a machine-dominated idiom, and his pictures became old-fashioned, almost journalistic. Even Wyndham Lewis, shaken by the death of his friend Gaudier-Brzeska, had qualms about trying to express the destructive force of military machinery.

  The only English painter who appeared to flourish was Paul Nash, who initially enthused, in letters that are shocking to read, over the pictorial aspects of trench warfare. By the time of Passchendaele in 1917, however, he was sick to his soul: ‘Sunrise and sunset are blasphemous,’ he wrote, ‘they are mockeries to man.’ He continued in his own way after the War, out of touch with the mainstream of Modernism as it eventually developed in England in the 1930s when its most important early figures included Wood’s painting partner in 1928, Ben Nicholson.

  The French painters enjoyed a remarkable rate of survival, but found their lives and their art changed by the War. The Cubist movement ended on 14 August 1915 when Braque, Gleizes, Léger, Lhote, Villon and Duchamp-Villon were mobilised. Braque was wounded but was able to resume his work after the War. Léger served as a sapper and was so impressed by his fellow engineers and the materials they handled that he forsook the abstract art towards which he had been moving and vowed never again to ‘let go of objects’. Andre Breton worked in a hospital where the use of psychoanalytic techniques laid the basis for the unconscious or automatic elements of Surrealism. Juan Gris and Picasso, the Spaniards, stayed behind, and Picasso mocked the War and its effects. ‘I took Braque and Derain to the station,’ he wrote, but ‘I never found them again.’ This epigram, spoken for effect, contained some truth about the ending of the first phase of Modernism. After the War, Braque concentrated on consolidation. Derain rejected experiment to become a classical, at times almost wilfully old-fashioned, painter.

  By the time Christopher Wood emigrated to Paris in 1921, the city had become a different place. The greatest holocaust ever seen in Europe had been enacted within earshot, and twice within gunshot, of Montmartre. Paris was depicted, largely by Americans, as a rodeo of reckless novelty, of sex and drugs and the frilly underwear of the Folies Bergères, but in fact it was a quieter place than before the War. Picasso, while scornful of his former Modernist confreres, had himself shown an interest in neo-classical forms. Matisse had left Paris for Nice where he was painting in a sensuous, highly coloured style. The new movements of Dada and Surrealism made noisy claims on an artist’s attention, but there was no obligation to sign up.

  When Wood arrived he was making a move less bold than Bomberg in 1913. But while he might be said to be in the second wave of English, the first one had been extraordinarily small: even as Paris began to fill with American students and Bohemians, a nineteen-year-old boy from Liverpool still looked like a pioneer in 1921. The other remarkable fact of Wood’s move was that he did not have much personal interest in the artistic movements that were forming in Paris. His own interests included the early work of Picasso, but stopped short of Cubism. He was a figurative painter, and while he took little tricks and calligraphic details from Cubism, he never tried to paint in that style. His alliance of himself to Picasso and what he represented was quite a humble recognition that this was where the talent and the future lay. If he did not copy it, he had to be near it; and this knowledge, amid all Wood’s ignorance and confusion about public affairs and even about art, showed a shrewd instinctive judgement.

  This surprisingly sure-footed decision was connected to the emotional certainties of his ambition to be a painter. His polio, and the three-year convalescent period of being nursed by his mother, had coincided with the absence of his father at the Front. His illness changed the course of his life: from being an athlete he became a cripple. He was shamefully removed from the world of other children, and was in continual pain. At the same time he became handsome and attractive; puberty came to him as he lay prone.

  He turned his frustrated physical and sexual energies to painting, which became an acceptable ve
hicle for all the unassimilated emotions of this harrowing period. He continued in later life to see his painting in this way, as when he viewed the ending of his affair with Meraud Guinness in the same way as the rejection of his designs for Diaghilev and used them both merely as a spur for his ambition. When he found as a crippled adolescent that he could paint, that he actually had some natural ability for it, he clasped the talent to his heart. In his life there was only one other emotion that counted, and that was the storm of enduring gratitude he felt towards his mother. She had saved him and nursed him; by encouraging him to paint she had helped release in him some tender, appreciative feelings towards the world he saw. It was natural that he should then make the one further step and lock together the two most important aspects of his emotional life: his painting would become a way of thanking and honouring his mother. The little paradox was that to accomplish this, he had to leave her. He had to go where the real art was and to escape from the influence of ‘Huyton’. Always there was the half-formed idea that he would one day return when he had sufficiently proved himself and made for her a monument that could never be tarnished or destroyed.

  Clare Wood encouraged him to believe he had a special mission and that she was its presiding deity. She once wrote to a friend of his: ‘I adore him, as you know, and he must make a big thing of his life and use his talent conscientiously. I feel very seriously about that, as it is a thing that has been given to him to use.’ Clare Wood’s support of her son against the judgement of her husband took courage, but her emotional investment in Kit’s career as a painter was almost as great as his own. Kit was enabled by his gift and by the fact that he was a man to live and enjoy those aspects of life and feeling that she had had to subdue to the requirements of her unimaginative husband. Lucius Wood was a decent man, but despite all he had seen at the Front from 1914-18 he lacked the ability to imagine the inner lives of those nearest to him. Clare and Kit were bent on some mission of their own, and she loved him with the unforgetting passion of a mother who had nursed her only son back from death.

  In the Paris of the 1920s Wood was a rarity: an Englishman who painted. In a world of doubtful glamour his clean-cut innocence was a quality to which everyone could respond. He was always well dressed, usually in English clothes, though the cuffs of his Jermyn Street shirts were often frayed. He looked clean, even if he had been working all night and smoking opium; his clear complexion seldom betrayed the excesses of his life. He spoke briskly and simply, and had a streak of gallantry which often made him choose to dance all evening with the plainest-looking woman at a party. Younger women, such as his friend Gerald Reitlinger’s sister Winifred, thus felt flattered by his attention. He courteously warned her that his and Gerald’s parties became wild after midnight and she should make arrangements to go home.

  His charm was qualified by his unreliability. He often failed to turn up at dinner parties if he thought someone who bored him might be there. His opium smoking also made him moody, though he warned friends not to worry if they called on him and found him distracted. He was quite punctilious about his louche habit.

  A Parisian friend, Jacques Porel, claimed that ‘He never uttered a cruel word. His presence alone was enough to save any gathering from vulgarity. At the same time he made you feel at ease in the order of things his delicacy had imposed.’ Porel also noticed a certain boyish playfulness: ‘His eyes looked down to the ground, his schoolboy pout was fixed, then would turn into a shy smile as he suddenly took out of his pocket – with exactly the same air of surprise – a thousand franc note or a pair of twenty-five centime coins, and said, “Look how rich I am. Georges, Jacques, listen, my dear chap. I’m asking you to dinner.” ‘ According to Porel, ‘one half expected him to clap his hands and jump up and down with glee.’

  Wood’s unreliability could be hurtful and alarming. Lucy Wertheim, a friend and supporter, waited for two hours at her flat for Wood to come to dinner as arranged. At ten o’clock a friend rang to say Wood was unwell. The next day he arrived unexpectedly at her birthday lunch in a restaurant in Piccadilly, thrust a picture into her arms and borrowed half a crown for the taxi. He had a black eye, spoke as though in a trance, and hardly ate. Lucy Wertheim believed that, ‘a restless energy seemed to impel him to keep moving whilst the knee that troubled him obliged him to take frequent rests.’ Yet she, like Winifred Nicholson, was powerfully affected by his presence from the first meeting onwards. She sensed something in him that was almost frighteningly dynamic.

  Wood sat on the train to Penzance in August 1926. He was ready to make the big push forwards. His private life had reached a fragile equipoise, his technique was sufficiently developed. In Ben Nicholson he had an ideal painting partner: quiet, dedicated and appreciative. Although Nicholson’s own painting would shortly embrace abstraction, never to return, he was at this time painting in a figurative style so similar to Wood’s that some people found their paintings hard to distinguish. Despite Wood’s social life and nervous character, Nicholson found him the most generous and inspiring companion he ever had. In analysing how Wood tried to emulate the Nicholsons it is easy to overlook how his painting inspired them at a difficult time in their lives.

  Wood’s only obstacle to high achievement was his increased reliance on opium. He told Frosca that he would try to do something about it for her sake as he did not wish his appreciation of her to have any narcotic element. At the same time he invited her to come and stay with him at Porthmeor Beach, in St Ives, and preferably to bring some high quality drugs with her. The trouble was that Tony Gandarillas was now seeing so much of Maria de Gramont that Wood could not get access to his supply.

  Frosca duly arrived at Wood’s little cottage, and to begin with all went well. His painting reached a new level and he felt happy with Frosca. He painted the sea, the boats and the local people with what Winifred Nicholson called ‘imaginative reality’. She believed his painting was now back on track after the frustrations caused to it by city life and the upheavals over Meraud. ‘I too,’ Winifred Nicholson recalled, ‘painted with keenest delight. My little boy [Jake] ran with bare feet by the sea.’ Like all Wood’s bright idylls, this one was short-lived. Frosca Munster was not a woman easily upstaged, but cliques of friends are always irritating to outsiders. Frosca did not feel threatened by Winifred as a sexual rival, but she felt uneasy about the artistic and personal intimacy she enjoyed with Wood. She made one or two comments to Winifred Nicholson which hurt her grievously. Winifred took herself off to walk along the seashore, turning them over in her heart.

  She would not admit to herself that she had the interest of a lover in Kit Wood. Her feeling, she told herself, was all spiritual. ‘My love for him,’ she later wrote, ‘was severe discipline, severe sacrifice, and meant going through fire, but fire purified it… and gave it that element that neither death nor sorrow can come near.’

  Whatever state of purity it reached in her recollection, she decided in the autumn of 1928 that she was not welcome at St Ives and had better leave. She said it was the hardest thing she had ever had to do. Nevertheless she managed to subdue her own feelings sufficiently to take some pleasure in the happiness that Frosca had brought to Kit. She had seen the look of joy on his face when Frosca had arrived at St Feock with all her ‘lovely, glistening frocks’, and she had seen the new strength of purpose that came into Wood’s life as a result, she believed, of Frosca’s influence. She believed Wood had found the arrangement he had long sought: a relationship with a woman who was a friend as well as a lover, and who consequently gave him the peace of mind to be fully creative.

  Wood and Ben Nicholson were out walking one day when they went past the door of a fisherman’s cottage. They looked inside and were amazed by what they saw: an array of primitive paintings they both believed to be bordering on genius. The painter was a retired fisherman called Alfred Wallis. He painted on old cardboard boxes, bus timetables, anything that came to hand. The pictures, which he had started to paint after the death of his wife i
n 1922, were of the sea and ships: they had a foreshortened perspective and crude lines, but an intriguing sense of form and colour. Wallis was a kind of picturesque original who might appeal to someone who had been to too many of the Comte de Beaumont’s fancy dress balls. He lived in a single room, where, much to his neighbour’s irritation, he played improvised melodies on a battered accordion that he kept beneath a purple spotted cover. He had once been a rag and bone man and had once run a shop, but had not been able to balance the books. He had a gruff attitude towards his painting and to such of Wood’s and Nicholson’s as they subsequently showed him.

  His effect on Wood’s work was considerable; in fact Winifred Nicholson thought that, after Picasso, Wallis was the most important single influence. His naïveté inspired Wood to develop an aspect of his style that had first become apparent in the days of ‘La Foire de Neuilly’. Wood was not a true naive like Wallis, and did not try to be, but he combined the naive with other elements of what was emerging as his mature style. Some critics commented that Wallis gave Wood an excuse for a certain clumsiness – that he gave a fancy vindication to a basic lack of technique – but Wood could have authenticated an unfinished element in his style by reference to any number of other painters, including the more respectable Picasso and Van Gogh. Wallis’s work persuaded Wood to narrow his range of colour and to experiment with house paint and board instead of oils and canvas, but what he really offered him was a renewed childlike directness: ‘I want a good new yacht… and a good peaint box.’

  On 15 October Frosca returned to Paris and Wood cried himself to sleep. He invited his mother to come and keep him company, but bad health prevented her from making the journey from Wiltshire. Alone again, he resumed his work and was excited by what he was doing. ‘It is a great moment in my life,’ he wrote. ‘The studentship has passed, my work is forming something quite personal and mature, unlike anybody else’s, and I don’t think anyone can paint the pictures I am doing.’ It was a fair comment on what had happened to his painting. St Ives did represent a genuine advance, a real breakthrough. Wood responded to it with the note of fatalistic desperation he found on such occasions: ‘This time of quiet has come at the right moment … now it is essential as it is now or never and I am making a big dash for it’