Dingy, seedy and gloomy are three adjectives not normally read in conjunction with a fourth, "beautiful," but the British post-impressionist Walter Sickert brings them all together in the series of paintings he made from 1905-12, known as "The Camden Town nudes." Executed in a lusciously morbid palette dominated by dark purples and greens, their bleak subject matter—prostitutes in grubby rooms—floats into vision through a dense texture of oil paint as crumbly as Wensleydale cheese. Women lie naked on old beds, sinking exhausted into their bedcovers, lit only by shards of streetlights coming through cracks in the blinds or curtains, their legs partly open. Our point of view is close to them, and above them, like a client.
Sickert's Camden Town nudes, on show at the Courtauld Gallery until mid-January, are surely among the greatest political paintings of British art. These are works about the exploitation of women, the male gaze and inner-city poverty. It is all the more remarkable that they are nudes—the most idealising and ancient genre of western art. Taken together, this unusually disciplined body of work is at once an attack on society and on art history.
It was the beginning of the 20th century, and the dawn of mass society and the mass media. Thousands of poor migrant workers filled the cities. Many of them were single women looking for work as servants, and family values were loosened. A recognisably modern nightlife was taking shape, characterised by pubs, music halls and brothels. The tabloids pandered to the obsession with sex and death that gripped a newly emerging urban society. In London between 1901 and 1906, the police mounted a large-scale campaign to stamp out brothels and streetwalkers. Sickert himself was fascinated by the case of Jack the Ripper (and in 2002, was improbably accused of being him by the US author Patricia Cornwell).
In 1907, Sickert's work was overtaken by events when a young Camden prostitute was murdered in her bed. It prompted him to make a few new paintings, in which an ominous male figure can be seen in the same room as a nude, one of which he titled The Camden Town Murder. Sickert's moral position here is uncertain—these works are ambitious even in their ambiguity. Many art historians have speculated about what Sickert was thinking when he painted them. Was he a voyeur, aroused by his subjects? Or an outraged social commentator? Perhaps the combination was itself a definitive modern sensation. He would only say that he wanted to paint modern life with realism—which makes his nudes precursors for Warhol's car crashes, electric chairs and celebrities.
In developing these narrative, tabloid-style images, the artist was moving against traditional academic nudes, which he despised. In an 1910 essay, "The Naked and the Nude," Sickert wrote: "The modern flood of representations of the vacuous images dignified by the name of the Nude represents an intellectual bankruptcy that cannot but be considered degrading." The academicians disagreed, and one retorted, "Sexualism in art can only be redeemed by the grand treatment. This is slum art, far worse than prostitution, because it is done by a man who should know better."
Sickert steered a course between the old and the new, and his working methods reflected this. Instead of painting in a studio or "on location," he combined the two. He rented cheap rooms in houses in Camden and used them as "sets." In the backgrounds of these pictures is the basic mass-produced furniture he found there; the iron beds, chests of drawers surmounted by oval mirrors and washbasins become the property of the nude subject.
Sickert had his faults. The flicks of his brush don't always evoke the faces of his sitters with the accuracy of his European peers. The chalky, frenetic surfaces of his pictures owe a huge debt to Degas's pastels without achieving their economy of means. As David Sylvester noted in a review of the Tate's 1960 retrospective, "Sickert's brushwork is not a vehicle for his sensations but a way of covering a canvas with a lively and lovely surface." Sylvester wrote later that year, "The tragic flaw in English painting is compromise, unwillingness to be committed to a point of view, a desire to have the best of two or more worlds (especially, in our time, a present and a past world)." This was Sickert to a T—an artist who wanted both the freedom of modernism and the moralising storytelling of 19th-century genre painting. But today this looks like less of a crime, and more of a virtue. Not all 20th-century artists obsessively honed a style towards its most pure formulation, like Kandinsky or Pollock. Many others, Picasso among them, negotiated their relationships with the styles of the day as if they were choosing ingredients at the supermarket for a recipe of their own invention.
