Transcript Into the Archive – George the Lay Figure (podcast) Bath Spa University Blog January 2019 By Dr Liz Renes

Deep in the darkest recesses of the basement of Main House lies an unusual object. Kept in a long coffin shaped box, on a warm summer’s day the lid is removed to reveal the disquieting shape of a human figure. Lacquered over with the dark patina of age and missing just a few fingers, lies George. George is one of Bath Spa’s more intriguing secrets - he is a lay figure (or mannequin as it is more commonly called) that used to belong to the Modernist painter Walter Sickert, and before him (supposedly), the satirical eighteenth-century painter William Hogarth. Carved from wood, his lips are sealed shut, revealing no secrets of what he might have seen in his possible two hundred plus year history - so it's up to us really to dig out George’s story.

George’s recent history with Bath Spa begins in 2004, when he was found unceremoniously in a barn at Corsham Court, a discarded by product of the more heady days of creative production that marked the Bath Scool of Art and Design’s history post World War II. Riddled with woodworm and missing a few appendages, George was sent to the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester for restoration - it was around this time his box like home was made for him - and he was displayed there for a time before he returned to the Library’s stores.

He slept for nearly a decade until 2013, when Jane Munro of the Fitzwilliam Museum enquired as to his inclusion in the upcoming Silent Figures exhibition, which explored the idea of artist’s mannequin from the fifteenth-century to the present day. Tracing the origins of the mannequin - Dutch for ‘little man’ - proved a fascinating but thorny subject for an exhibition, touching on the often surreal and uncanny representations of artist’s figures that sometimes ventured into the realm of fetish and kitsch. Though the mannequin was a handy substitute for the often (annoyingly) animate human sitter - it was particularly useful in painting fidgety children - at times its inert nature proved a bit too alluring for the artist. This is particularly evident in the tale of Oskar Kokoshka, who had his mannequin made in the likeness of his ex-girlfriend - a story, I believe, that would warrant its own different kind of podcast. A veritable Freudian palava of a subject, the exhibition unsurprisingly won the Fitzwilliam Museum the Apollo exhibition of the year award, giving George his all too brief 15 minutes of fame.

While George has a less sordid history, his existence as an object of simultaneous fascination and repulsion is a delightfully rich topic for discussion. While little is known about the history of George before the early 20th C, we do know he was passed along to the late Victorian painter Walter Sickert in 1929 by his brother in law, Major Lessore, who owned the Beaux Arts Gallery in London - with the provenance that he once belonged to the satirical eighteenth-century painter William Hogarth.

If we can take this origin story as true, then at the time of his supposed ‘birth’, George would have been at the centre of an industry that combined an increased understanding in biology and the human form with advances in mechanics - I think often of the automatons of Marie-Antoinette’s court and the increasing realism of porcelain dolls and figurines. Though simple in form, with a basic structure of wood carved around articulated metal joints, George would have been an expensive but necessary studio tool for a contemporary artist like Hogarth, whose livelihood depended not only on his accuracy in capturing the human form, but all the human foibles and follies that lived within it.

At this time, the body was the precious but little understood site of the human psyche. Medical and anatomical texts balance complex charts tracing the various ‘humours’ and ‘spirits’ of the body with increasingly detailed anatomical drawings, based on (sometimes) real human specimens (when they could get them). Teaching collections like the Hunterian museums in both Glasgow and London, which emerged in the last decades of the eighteenth-century, encouraged those practicing medicine - and increasingly art - to draw directly from life, down to its goriest cellular detail. Amputated arms and legs, spleens, livers and brains shimmered in clear glass display jars in row upon row of cabinetry in these museums - breaking the body down into parts, completely independent of the human soul within. In Hogarth’s time, we were really wrestling to understand the body as both a biological entity and as the home of the soul - the elemental life spark, that seat of intelligence, compassion and reason.

Throughout the history of art, the most successful artists have always been noted as the ones who are able to capture that miraculous intersection between the biological body and its spiritual dweller. Hogarth’s drive to understand this made him a great artist - his work is instrumental in the popularisation of what is known as ‘physiognomics’, or the ‘science’ of interpreting human character through the analysis of the features. Considering his depictions of people as ‘characters’ as opposed to ‘caricatures’, he attempted to really understand the depth of the person he was depicting, as opposed to making mocking assumptions about them based on appearance – when typically, it was thought that if you were ugly you were bad in character, and if you were beautiful, you were moral and good. While this riled many in contemporary intellectual circles, Hogarth asserted himself as a true student of humanity as it expressed itself in the body, a feature evident by his massive popularity in his own time and beyond.

Though we don’t know when, it is possible to consider George was a notable player in Hogarth’s evolving understanding of the complexity of the human body. Like vials of liquids in a chemist’s lab, George would have provided Hogarth with a blank space onto which the artist could project his experiments with expression and aesthetics, a feature of his life’s work that began to enthral him in the 1730s. By this time, Hogarth’s career was quite successful - there was a thriving demand for prints of his satirical paintings - and he would have had the wealth required to either purchase or commission a lay figure, which during this period, and in the centuries to come, was considered a very large expense. When the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown bought his in Paris in 1848, he was aghast at his own extravagance, later recounting the purchase as nothing but ‘sheer madness’.

Hogarth died childless in 1764, so we can only speculate that George was either passed down or purchased in a studio sale by another artist, likely one of less means, as used mannequins were often the only way such items could be afforded by the up and coming artistic class.

In any case, we can only assume that for centuries George continued his role as another tool of the artist - I wonder now, how many paintings I look at from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that may have his serene expression hiding behind the human visage. Eventually he emerges, a bit worse for wear but no less victorious, into the studio of Walter Sickert in 1929.

How can we characterize Walter Sickert in our short time together? Well, I can tell you as an art historian what I’ve always thought of him (or rather his work) - grubby, dark, and violent. The recent assertions that he may have been Jack the Ripper were not lost on me looking at his artwork, despite their questionable source.

But perhaps this impulse of repulse is correct - Sickert espoused finding what you can call, the sublime in the grime - reacting against the polished Academic standards of the Royal Academy - which in its day was a bit like Marmite (you either loved it or you hated it). These days we would call him a gritty artist - he was drawn to stories of crime and to the macabre horror of the stage (think garish lights, clowns and heavy makeup). He preferred working in both symbolic and literal chaos – his studio was a mess- with thick feverish brushstrokes - or what I might call a type of ‘creative violence’.

His artistic life began in these spaces and thus marked him - he originally trained to be an actor before turning to art at the Slade in 1881 - until he apprenticed to Whistler, who advised him to leave the Slade, remarking that ‘You’ve lost your money, no need to lose your time as well’!

Fun fact: Whistler actually entrusted Sickert with taking his infamous ‘Portrait of Whistler’s Mother’ to the Paris Salon in 1883. It was there he met Degas, who had more of an influence on his style than Whistler did - particularly the draw of the theatre and stage, and to what was then considered the ‘salacious’ characters that populated it.

For twenty years, between 1885 and 1906, he spent his summers and further time in Dieppe and France, where he cultivated contacts with French writers, painters, and Decadent authors – establishing himself as a bridging point between Victorianism and emerging Modernism.

Sickert and Bath

It was around World War I where Sickert’s story begins to intersect with us here at Bath Spa. Unable to make his yearly trips abroad to France, he began to look to England for new travel inspiration. Eventually he settled on Bath in the summers of 1917 and 1918. Though he fell in love with it immediately, the city also held a special meaning to him as an echo of his own history - his great uncle John Sheepshanks once lived in a house at the end of Camden Crescent.

------He writes to Ethel Sands: ‘Bath is it!’ ‘There never was such a place for rest & comfort & leisurely work. Such country & such town. And the mellifluous amiability of the west-country gaffers and maidens, all speaking the dialect which became the American we know and love! • Walter Sickert, letter to Ethel Sands, [?1918], Tate Archive TGA 9125/5, no.81

------

After the War, Sickert would not return to Bath until 1938, but in the period between the wars he also had a connection to Bath Spa that wouldn’t reveal its influence until later in World War II. One of his pupils during his time teaching in London in the 1920s was the budding zoologist and painter Paul Ayshford Metheun, Lord Metheun of Corsham Court.

Metheun’s nephew, James Metheun-Campbell notes Sickert’s influence on Paul who:

even followed Sickert’s practice of working from photographs on occasion, and at the Court there exists a fine portrait of the 2nd Lord Metheun (Paul’s grandfather), which is copied from a photo, and this is so similar to Sickert both in the handling of the paint and in the general atmosphere and effects of light, that one feels it would be perfectly feasible to alter the signature without anyone being the wiser!’

To this day, a work by Sickert still resides in the Metheun collection at Corsham, a testament to this important but forgotten link.

George reappears into our story around this period, in 1929. The story goes that when he was brought to Sickert’s studio in Highbury Place, the very sight of the movers bringing the corporeal shape up the stairs spurred Sickert to action. Calling an undertaker to come and wrap poor George up like a proper corpse, he was painted as the body in Sickert’s version of The Raising of Lazarus, with Sickert in the role of Christ and Cecily Hey in the role of Lazarus’s sister. There is a particularly amusing photograph here of Sickert in his studio wearing a paper chef’s hat, with the image of George as Lazarus painted on the wall behind him.

Though George’s presence is only officially documented in Lazarus, additional images of him have emerged as Sickert’s works continue to be catalogued. A watercolour from 1930 shows George seated at the table with two ladies in wide brimmed hats - respectably, no doubt, having his afternoon tea.

Sickert and the Bath Academy of Art

Sickert eventually moved permanently to Bath in 1938, where he would spend his remaining years until his death in 1942. Clifford Ellis, Head of the Bath Academy of Art at the time, recounts that Sickert wrote to him nearly right after he arrived, requesting to donate his time as a teacher to the Academy’s students, fearing that he would be ‘soon to be called to his father’s’ and that it would ‘be a pity to not share stories of the people he had been fortunate enough to know’ like Whistler and Degas.

As Ellis recounts - Sickert would arrive like clockwork every Friday morning at 11AM, and would talk for an hour or two about life and art, sometimes lecturing from objects in his own collection. A key element of these talks included the ‘marvellous and magical’ bits where he would discuss his own artistic philosophy, one which emphasised finding beauty in the quotidian or the everyday. Seeing one day a lithograph by Duncan Grant on the wall, he reportedly proclaimed that ‘You know, you don’t let fireworks [like that] off everyday - life is more sombre and more beautiful’. Looking around for an example, he turns to what he then called his ‘dowdy’ wife, describing the dirty ribbon on her hat, and her nondescript grey coat. ‘But if you go on looking at her… and you realise her there, you [begin to see] the marvellous colours that she has chosen - the ribbon begins to burn out bright crimson, and that scarf becomes like a tiger skin’.

It was likely around this time that George made his introduction to the students of the Bath Academy of Art. It is my theory that George passed into his role as teacher post- Sickert’s death in 1942, when his wife Therese offered their studio home to the students after their buildings had been bombed in the Bath Blitz. I can see a grieving widow (and artist herself) wanting the objects to be used, to continue her husband’s legacy in some way.

The record does show that that she did offer objects for the students to take away. Tony Benge, a later student, recounts that George was not the only object of Sickert’s that made its way into the Academy’s collection. He was once awarded a ‘a shiny silver thing like you get on a Christmas Tree, ‘only bigger, much bigger’ that belonged to the Ellises with a Sickert provenance - which he subsequently broke into a thousand pieces. Whether or not George was carried away in the night by mischievous art students, or carried solemnly as a prized possession, we will never know.

The Body at Bath Academy of Art

I think particularly of George emerging as a both a silent figure and active participant in how ideas about the body in art began to shift between the time of Sickert to the postwar years of the 50s and 60s, when the colour and energy of movements like Abstract Expressionism formed the visual language of the day. For me, it seems logical that the depiction of the body began to shift into something more amorphous and less well defined. If you think that an entire generation of youth had both seen and read for years about the body being broken and mangled during the war, you can imagine that had to have an effect on how depictions of the body changed during this time. It was a subject prime to be reborn and remade, much like in the art of Paul Nash and his ‘new world’ and the ‘new dawn’ of modernism in the likes of artists like Epstein and C.R.W. Nevinson.

Sickert had controversial ideas about the body - some scholars discuss often his ‘Camden Town Murder’ series and his images of violence against women. His bodies are often marked or grotesque in some way - his wide swatches of harsh colouring often turn the faces of his subjects into masks, not unlike that of George in his role as the passive mannequin. Sickert, in effect, visually turns human figures into lay figures. So when George emerges as an artistic tool post 1929, it is likely he was used in this similarly abstract way - as an experimental object that helped emerging artists to continue to slowly break down the body into simple shapes and shadows. In Lazarus, for example, Sickert appears to dissolve the edges and blur the boundaries, merging towards a type of figural abstraction that would become more evident as the twentieth century moved on.

As a teaching tool at the Bath Academy of Art, George would have continued to allow students to play with their ideas of abstracting the body. In his reminiscences, student Donn Evans notes that by the time he entered the Bath Academy of Art in the 1950s, knowledge of the body was no longer a requirement - in fact, it was positively passé. He remembers that, with particular anxiety, he fervently studied anatomy before his entry into the school, thinking that such skills were, of course, essential to the study of art. And yet, much to his surprise, [he quotes]:

At Corsham at last, some two years after my interview, I was disappointed to find second and third year students unimpressed with my ability to rattle off dates and names and bones and muscles. [point blank and presumably with an eye roll, he was told] ‘You won’t need any of that stuff here’.

The Bath Academy of Art seemed to have what I would characterise as a ‘playful’ - even joyful - approach to the body in their works, something that I think emerges from the happy communal experience of living, learning and teaching that Clifford Ellis fought for as head of the Academy. Kenneth Armitage says that Ellis wanted it to be an ‘environment of comfort and privilege’ for students who had been deprived in the war, and he succeeded in this respect, and I believe this shows in the art.

One photo from this time exemplifies this cheeky attitude towards anatomy. A photograph from the Summer Exhibition at Corsham in 1960 shows the heads of students Maureen and Jennifer flanking a sculpted model of a skull - titled as a ‘transformation’ - although who is being transformed, we are not quite certain.

The body as it emerges from the Bath Academy of Art shows how images of the corporeal were shifting from something literal to symbolic. I know I’ve used it before, but I really get a sense that there is a new joy in the way the students and teachers were reinventing the body in their art, and its something I want to explain to you.

An excellent example, and an artist who is experiencing a recent resurgence in interest, is the sculptor Kenneth Armitage who was head of the Sculpture department at the Bath Academy of Art from 1946 to 1956. A key feature of his work is the body - it engages with semi-abstract figures, often in bronze, that are often reaching, embracing, or pondering.

There are, perhaps, echoes of George’s shape here - but the cellular level of anatomy that fascinated Hogarth in the eighteenth century is distilled down to an echo. Instead, the expressive capabilities of that subtle figural shape begins to take centre stage, echoing what I mentioned before about George’s great potential as a type of ‘blank slate’ for the artist to project upon. For Armitage, and indeed for much of the abstract figural work of the postwar period - it’s not about how the body looks - but what the body can do, and how the body can express. Armitage found particular power in the female body - he saw them as ‘goddesses as creators’ - and he often used female type forms to indicate a sense of power and mystery about life.

Another key figure at Corsham during these years was Armitage’s close friend, painting instructor Peter Potworowski, who began teaching at the Bath Academy of Art in 1949. While Potworowski isn’t as widely known a figure as Armitage, he is referred to often in student reminiscences. Joyce Yates remembered his obsession with light, and a studio ‘full of colour and form, [which] abounded in visual challenges, opening eyes to new ways of seeing…’ while Peter Lane remembers his ability to open your eyes ‘to the subtlety of colours where, previously, none had appeared to exist’.

Potworowski continues the Academy’s playful toying with the shape of the body. Outlines of sleeping forms abound, washed in shades of Sickertian green and grey, as they lie faceless and in sparse outline - echoing the shape of George but with the slight gendered twist in the addition of a skirt or an Edwardian updo. In other places, the outline of the body is almost childlike - singular and brightly coloured. At some point, a ‘nude reclining’ becomes simply a dark outline, shaped almost like a toy fish, against a background of soft yellow.

Howard Hodgkin, who taught at the Academy from 1955-66, echoes Potworowski’s distillation of the body down to simple, almost completely abstract shapes. His R.B.K. from 1969 depicts a figure seated before a rectangular framed window to the left - crossed over by slats that appear like window blinds. Here, the only identifiable echoes of the body we have are in the contrast of the curved shapes against the linear slats of the window - and in the title ‘RBK’ - which stands for Ronald Brooks Kitaj, who is the supposed subject of this portrait.

Hodgkin often obscured his sitters, using colour and line to playfully distort the space or identifiable features of his subjects. The body becomes decorative - another piece in the artist’s toolkit, or it becomes something we only see in the mind’s eye - a curve here, a headlike shape there. Like a dream, it emerges only if you wish to see it.

These approaches can be summarised in part by the description of a work by Gillian Ayres - another Bath Academy teacher - called Distillation, now in the Tate. Tate describes her emphasis on pictorial space, materials and colour, and the balancing of different elements, noting that ultimately, it was about the spirit of the thing, the materiality of the paint, its texture brightness. 'So that nothing is more important than anything else. One was into the idea of no composition...'. While references to the body abound in these titles and in these works, the body instead becomes a vehicle for the material, the texture and colour and expressive capabilities of paint, pen, or bronze.

Conclusion

So where does this leave us? The way I see it, George had an influence in helping these emerging artists develop their sense of how the body played (or didn’t play) into their ideas about expression and form.

Aside from his status as a teaching tool, he is an object that has carried the spirit of artistic understanding about the body through the centuries - from Hogarth’s quests to explore the spirit in the anatomy, to Sickert’s drive to find the ‘sublime in the grime’, to the freedom and joy of the works that emerged out of the Bath Academy of Art post World War II. I can only hope that sometime soon George will re-emerge again from his case to re-inspire Bath Spa students once more.