'With an almost pathetic fatality doing what is right': late Sickert and his critics

• Autores: Sam Rose
• Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 37, Nº. 1, 2014, págs. 126-147
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This essay explores the dialogue between Walter Richard Sickert and his formalist interpreters, in particular Roger Fry, as an important way in to Sickert's later work and its reception. With a close examination of intenationality and its rhetorical practice in the theories of Fry and Clive Bell, it can be seen that these criticts constructed a version of Sickert that led them to describe his expressed opinions as mere by-products of flippancy and eccentricity, and instead discover his 'real' intentions to be in line with their general theory of art. Reread in the context of Sickert's passed-over writings, his actions and artworks of the 1920s form a more coherent picture than previously established, and can in part be seen as a deliberate counter to Fry's ideas. By the 1940s, however, writers once again took the formalist reading as key to the artist's work, with analysis unwittingly guided by prior assumptions about Sickert's oeuvre and its place in the history of modern painting. The case thus casts light on the way that formalist readings were and still are able to be sustained in spite of strong opposition and against contrary claims of artistic intent.