Sickert In Venice
By Ossian Ward, Time Out
24.03.09
Byron called Venice ‘the masque of Italy’, presumably in
reference to its famous masked balls and fearsome reputation for
revelry. But if the city did ever hide anything behind its
sightseers’ façades, then surely it was the English painter Walter
Sickert who best succeeded in stripping away the superficial skin
in order to reveal its seedy underbelly. Nothing prepares you for
the darkness of Sickert’s Venice, indeed the reproductions in the
catalogue and on this page seem to have been considerably
brightened by a designer worried that the source images were
impossibly murky. Rather than ‘La Serenissima’ (the most serene),
Sickert presents us with ‘La Pessimissima’, a heavy and atmospheric
place not encountered in romantic literature or dreamy
travelogues.
As a studio hand to Whistler, Sickert would have been familiar with
his tutor’s moonlit depiction of St Mark’s Square, even borrowing
the musical title ‘Nocturne’ that Whistler first applied to his
Thames paintings. And while Whistler loved to paint the watery
islands of the Veneto after rainfall, Sickert waited for nightfall
to unpack his paintbox or sought refuge in only the dimmest church
interiors. As the sun set over the Basilica, the sky would turn
plum or dusky rose, bruising the architecture of its empty streets
and steeping the black canals and lagoon in a Stygian gloom. In
1895 an unkind critic complained that Sickert’s pictures were
outshone by their frames, but their beauty is precisely in his
economical use of bright highlights, which perfectly capture the
glints and glimpses of an evening spent wandering the lamp-lit
alleys of Venice.
The same film of dirty grey that he applied to his landscape
backgrounds also obscures his Venetian figures and portraits from
1903-04. A biographical explanation for Sickert’s moodiness goes
that as his marriage frayed into tatters, the artist turned to
prostitutes and pleasures of the night to see him through hard
times. But Sickert enjoyed his lunches as much as his liaisons,
immortalising the owner of the local trattoria as well as fellow
diners and regulars. The painted ladies he depicted are somewhat
ridiculous – his favoured model La Giuseppina looks like a cross
between a geisha girl and a beehived Amy Winehouse – but the
darkened interiors of his boudoir scenes, such as ‘La Nera’ (The
Dark One), are as powerful as any of his later Camden Town ‘Ripper’
pictures. It’s not just psychological shade that Sickert mastered
in Venice, but a grip over that point at which shadows break down
visual recognition, leaving other senses to take over.