“Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Nudes”
Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London.
October 25, 2007-January 20, 2008
Walter Sickert (1860–1942), pupil of Whistler, close friend of Degas, was a talented British artist who blended impressionism and realism in distinctive and disturbing ways. When Sickert turned to doing nudes for the first time in the Edwardian period, he denounced the idealized nude women painted by his contemporaries as “obscene monsters,” sugary Venuses, and frothy nymphs churned out by artists who had lost touch with life. He set up his London studio in Camden Town, a working-class area of seedy lodging houses; in this respect it had not changed when I lived there seventy years later. In his studio he created a sparse bleak room with an old iron bedstead and invited his models, far from young and perfect, many recruited from the local whores, to sprawl on them. The whores made good models because they had no qualms about stripping off and being arranged in ungainly and unladylike postures, a quality less common than it is today. In his pictures they looked the part, lumpy anonymous bodies on beds, resting between customers, and that was how the pictures were perceived. Sickert used great painterly skill in his use of light, texture, and position to emphasize this.
In 1907 a prostitute named Emily Dimmock was murdered in Camden Town; the crime was given enormous publicity in the popular press. Everyone remembered the murders in Whitechapel twenty years earlier, when