The Camden Town Group in Context

In his 1910 article ‘The naked and the Nude’, Walter Sickert produced a stinging rebuke of the nude in contemporary academic art. This appeared during the period when, for the first time in his career, the female nude became a central theme in Sickert’s painting. It coincided with his attempts to assert his position at the forefront of modern painting, exhibiting alongside avant-garde artists in Paris and helping to create an avant-garde in London, culminating in the exhibitions of the Camden Town Group in 1911 and 1912. As for many avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century, from Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse to the German expressionists, the nude offered Sickert a potent subject with which to strike at the heart of conventional artistic practice while simultaneously renewing its relevance to modern painting and modern life.2

Sickert’s argument in ‘The naked and the Nude’ was that the nude had become so completely idealised in academic painting and in art school teaching that after decades of artistic inbreeding it had evolved into an ‘obscene monster’.3 He compared it to the ‘living picture’ acts that were a popular music-hall turn of the day (fig.1).4 These consisted of artistes in flesh-coloured body-stockings striking poses that aped highly regarded examples from high art that were familiar to audiences ‘nourished for generations on the Academy and Chantrey bequest nudes’, as Sickert noted.5 For him, these ‘doubly edited and anodyne incitements to the worship of beauty’ were indistinguishable from works by artists who had been taught to turn out versions of, for instance, Frederick Lord Leighton’s The Bath of Psyche, which was first exhibited in 1890 (Tate N01574, fig.2).6 Sickert urged that the nude needed to be brought back into contact with reality so that ‘the student can forget the lifeless formulas of generations of ushers, and see what creative artists have ever seen in the nude’.7

Over the previous five years, Sickert had sought to reinvent the nude in his own practice. Although he began this in Neuville and then Venice from around 1902, it was upon his return to London in 1905 that he began to pursue the subject fully. He produced a group of uncompromisingly raw paintings of female models, often posed on iron bedsteads and set in seedy Camden Town lodging rooms which he rented as studios. La Hollandaise c.1906 (Tate T03548, fig.3) epitomises his approach. It is a painting about the stark material realities of flesh and iron. The unflattering fall of Sickert’s light defines the large bulk of the woman’s thigh and her sagging breast at the expense of her face, which is dashed through with the brush and broken up in shadow, the iron bar of the bed appearing to cut her left ear. Sickert assertively strips away conventional idealisations, presenting his model as a naked woman painted with unflinching candour. She is the antithesis of the pre-packaged classical goddesses and nymphs that he so despised in academic painting.

Citing the example of his friend Edgar Degas, in ‘The naked and the Nude’ Sickert espoused the importance of posing and lighting in unconventional ways and in real surroundings in order to see the model afresh. His group of three paintings produced in Paris of the model Blanche, which includes Woman Washing her Hair 1906 (Tate N05091, fig.4), come closest to Degas’s example of observing the model unawares, as if looking through a keyhole. Yet it was Sickert’s Camden Town nudes that most powerfully achieved ‘a sensation of a page torn from the book of life’, as he put it in another context.8 For many contemporary viewers, Sickert’s naked women sprawled out in murky lodging rooms conveyed strong associations with the dangerous realities of the darker side of modern London life. The French critic Louis Vauxcelles was admiring and unequivocal, describing these figures as ‘whores collapsed on the unmade bed, whores with withered bodies, weary from the harsh work of prostitution’.9 English critics were generally more equivocal. Many could admire Sickert’s technique but struggled to square this with his sordid subject matter: ‘Is Mr Sickert cynical, is he flouting conventional proprieties, or is he really content with these musty, flabby realities?’ asked the Daily Telegraph.10

For all their gritty realism, Sickert’s paintings do not simply replace the artifice of the nude with a naked reality drawn from the underside of modern life. If examples such as La Hollandaise undercut moribund conventions then they do so unashamedly and elaborately as contrived studio set-ups in which lighting, props and models are carefully positioned by Sickert’s directorial hand. That hand appears explicitly in The Studio: The Painting of a Nude 1906 (fig.5), which exposes fully what Sickert called the ‘highly artificial game’ of painting.11 This image, composed of multiple reflections within his studio, makes a spectacle out of the artifice of painting itself in which both artist and model are caught in the act. As he makes clear in ‘The naked and the Nude’: ‘There are many artifices that a draughtsman may use to get away from the obsession of the cliché, to keep out of the old ruts of expressions, and find fresh words and living thoughts for truths that are ever young.’12

The power of these paintings lies in this oscillation between artifice and reality. We see them as studio nudes, set up as artistically challenging subject matter for Sickert’s bravura handling of paint; but this jars with what else we see: naked women in cheap lodging rooms, often fraught with themes of sexual danger. It is with L’Affaire de Camden Town 1909 (fig.6), one of Sickert’s four much-discussed ‘murder’ paintings, that his disruptive approach finds its most complete expression. The inclusion of a clothed male figure in the scene, the naked woman’s explicit pose, and its provocative title (relating to the famous 1907 murder of Emily Dimmock in Camden Town) profoundly unsettle the status of the nude.13

After about 1912 Sickert began to move away from the subject of the nude, perhaps feeling he had exhausted its potential over the previous decade. In stripping away its idealised academic formulae and removing it from a stable context, Sickert had exposed the subject matter’s rebarbative character. Today, these paintings strike us as assertively modern, precisely because they defy categorisation as either ‘the naked’ or ‘the Nude’.