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October 4, 2007
Sickert the Ripper
Now this is a show I'd like to see:
WALTER SICKERT’S reputation may never recover from being fingered as Jack the Ripper by the American crime writer Patricia Cornwell five years ago.Art critics and historians have dismissed the charges, based on an investigation that cost her $2million, as circumstantial, ignorant and downright fanciful without quite shaking the macabre link between one of Britain’s greatest painters and the Victorian serial killer who disembowelled five prostitutes in the East End of London in 1888.
Now audiences have a chance to judge for themselves whether Sickert was a killer or just an artist with a particularly ghoulish imagination when the paintings which Cornwell cited as evidence of her suspicions are displayed together for the first time.
Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Nudes at the Courtauld Institute of Art in Central London from October aims to “provide the first major account of his reinvention of the nude as a subject for modern painting.”
The star attractions among more than 25 canvases and related drawings will be four profoundly disturbing paintings from around 1908 known as The Camden Town Murder paintings.
Go read the whole thing. There's one picture.
Further:
Sickert is an under appreciated painter (as one can say about any British painter after the 18th century peak, I suppose). The Sickert painting that first hit me was not one of the Camden Town Nudes but Miss Earhart's Arrival (1932, late work), which I saw at the Tate - click and see. It's really something - it captures English weather and Britishy Modernism. It's a big painting - almost 2 meters wide - and grabbed me from across a room. I have no idea if Sickert was the Ripper (I read the Cornwell book and thought she'd better stick to novels), but he sure was a painter.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at October 4, 2007 8:31 AM