Late Bloomer

“I was twenty-one before I saw a good picture,” Sir Matthew Smith once said of his insular upbringing in the shadow of his pious, businessman father. Born October 22, 1879, Smith eventually resisted his father’s attempts to place him in the world of business and, despite ill health, willed himself into the world of art. In 1908, Smith traveled to France to study at the Slade, the art school run by Henri Matisse. Although he most likely didn’t study directly with Matisse, Matisse influenced the entire curriculum of the school. Smith’s Dulcie (above, from 1915) shows how he took the style of Matisse in his Fauvist days and adapted it to his own uses. The connection with Matisse opened up doors to Smith that allowed him to exhibit with the likes of Matisse, Kandinsky, Fernand Léger, and Georges Rouault all before World War I erupted and forced Smith to return to England. Because of this influence of Matisse, Smith seemed “more French than English” upon his return, according to one contemporary, in terms of his handling of color to elicit emotion. Smith neatly smuggled Matisse across the Channel and overnight opened the eyes of his countrymen to the next big thing in painting.

Within a few years of returning to England, Smith found himself drafted into the war. He suffered shrapnel wounds in combat that taxed his already frail health, but the experience of war exacted a greater toll on his mind, beginning a cycle of creativity alternating with depression that would plague the rest of his life. Smith eventually established a London studio near that of Walter Sickert, whose (in)famous “Camden Town” nudes set the standard for the nude form in English painting in the early twentieth century. In Model Turning (above, from 1924), Smith slowly turns away from Matisse’s influence and turns toward a style closer to that of Sickert’s. The red skirt and blue and purple cushions hark back to Fauvism, but the instability of the figure itself generated by the roughness of the brushwork is pure Sickert. Actually, Smith exceeds even Sickert’s penchant for molding the figure in color like a sculpture rather than through line.

Smith continued to progress in a more Sickert-esque direction. In one of his many portraits of his friend and fellow painter Augustus John (above, from 1944), Smith handles the subject roughly. John referred to his portrait as “another hemorrhage for Matthew” in acknowledgment of the bloody, gory way Smith painted flesh even in the portraits of friends. As the pace of his cyclical depression increased, Smith’s view of life and humanity seemed to darken considerably. The young Francis Bacon admired Smith’s troubled style and patterned his own work after it. In many ways, Smith is the link between Sickert and Bacon, the two most important painters of the nude in English painting in the twentieth century. Smith’s evolution from Fauvism, one kind of beastliness, to the later brand of beastliness in his final works demonstrates how the late bloomer more than made up for lost time.

A Lover and a Fighter

Perhaps the most pugnacious and sex-obsessed artist of his time, Augustus John knew and painted most of the great figures of British history and arts in the first half of the twentieth century, such as Wyndham Lewis (above, from 1905). Born January 14, 1878, John claimed that, after diving into shallow water and cracking his skull open on a rock, genius flowed forth from his pen and brush. With his equally never-ending libido, John continually tried “to draw the women he bedded, and bed the women he drew,” as one critic put it. Both a barroom brawler and a bravura portraitist, John’s life story is as entangled and entertaining as few others in modern art history.

Adding another level of complexity to his complex love life was John’s sister, Gwen John, who was also an artist. (The Tate exhibited the siblings’ work together in 2005.) While Augustus simultaneously juggled his marriage with his wife, Ida, during his affair with his mistress, Dorelia, Gwen upset the entire balance by "eloping" with Dorelia. Later, Gwen traveled to France and became the mistress of Rodin, who soon tired from her smothering possessiveness and dropped her. Amidst this pandemonium, Augustus found the energy to portray such figures as T.E. Lawrence (above, from 1919) in full “Lawrence of Arabia” regalia.

John painted some of the most perceptive portraits of the literary figures of his age, including W.B. Yeats (above, from 1907), George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, and Dylan Thomas. (He met Thomas, naturally, in a bar and even introduced Thomas to his future wife.) Aside from these stunning portraits, John’s main focus was, of course, on drawing the female nude. John’s nudes resemble those drawn by Gustav Klimt in their troubling intimacy and wide array of poses. John’s personal life always remained a mess. His mistress Dorelia, after taking his sister Gwen as a lover, later took John’s wife Ida as a lover, too. Augustus, Dorelia, and Ida all lived together in Paris for a time, until John decided that three really was a crowd and returned to London in search of a new mistress. The myth of the bohemian artist exclusively sleeping and painting his way through life is usually just a myth, but Augustus John lived that myth exhaustively to the end of his days.