Lives of the artist
When I studied French and German literature for my A levels our teacher had a rather pedantic view that little was served in studying the life of the writer.
In fact as I soon appreciated it’s crucial. Michael Stuart was complaining to me that in his music course he learned far too little about the composers. No such criticism can be levelled against our art teacher whose courses I now – somewhat reluctantly – attend on Zoom.
In the course on French art she informed us that after Delacroix and Gericault the artist began to emerge as an individual and non-conformist genius.
Prior to that in England and France the Academies were most influential in determining acceptance and style.
The artist, except in the Netherlands, sought commissions and patronage and in so doing did not promote his personality.
By the twentieth century the artist was a flawed genius like Van Gogh, Picasso or Francis Bacon and one wonders in these times whether the flaws will become more critical.
Will Picasso’s reputation be re-evaluated for treating the women in his life so badly?
In all the artists I have mentioned it is imperative to understand their lives. Delacroix, for example, was the illegitimate son of Marshal Talleyrand and because of that achieved many commissions.
Delacroix hugely admired John Constable who never left England and only painted East Bergholt, Hampstead and Brighton.
There is another point here which came up in the lesson yesterday on realism and the Barbizon School covering such luminaries of French art as Millet, Corot and Courbet.
Corot, like Cezanne later, disguised their affluent background, in the latter ‘s case his father was a rich banker in Aix-en-Provence.
Thus these artists who glorified toil in the field rarely had a rural background, Theodore Rousseau lived in Paris, fell out with the salon and decamped to Barbizon near Fontainebleau. The peasant was no longer the jolly rustic yokel of Breughel but a hard worker who worked the land.
Last week we studied the Bloomsbury Group.
Here you could argue that their exotic lifestyles were greater than their talents. Dorothy Parker with her customary wit observed of them.
“They live in squares, paint in circles, love in triangles.”
Vanessa Bell the eldest of the Stephens children bought a house in Gordon Square Bloomsbury with her inheritance. Her brother Toby introduced students from Cambridge like Lytton Strachey and his cousin Roger Fry to the house and The Bloomsbury Set coalesced.
Vanessa Bell acquired an outpost in the country at Charleston, Sussex, near her sister Virginia Woolf. She painted there with Duncan Grant who brought his lover down Bunny Garnett to the house. Vanessa had a short affaire with Duncan which produced a child Angelica who then married Bunny. Dora Carrington was totally obsessed with Lytton Strachey another gay.
Yet I have to say that in looking at the paintings of Grant and Bell, none struck me as of the highest class.
Indeed you might argue that the greatest contributions to art of the set were the two Post Impressionist exhibitions that Roger Fry organised at the Grafton Gallery in 1910 and 1912.
Fry coined the phrase Post Impressionism and Paul Cezanne was his hero. These two exhibitions attended by 12,000 and 25,000 viewers were panned by the critics. “Art quake” was one description and Fry was called mad, which was particularly vindictive as his wife was in an asylum, but they opened the eyes of a parochial art community mired in George Watts and Alma Tadema to what was happening on the continent.
Conversely one of the reasons I do not identify with some of the greats of the past like Breughel is we know so little about his life.
For Renaissnace painters lives we can read Vasari but his Lives of the Artists was written many years after their deaths.
So I am now convinced that to appreciate properly the creative urge you need to examine the life.
By doing so you understand what genius is. How for example could Beethoven have composed the Ninth Symphony and String Quartets when he was totally deaf?
