Overview
This biography of Mark Gertler reappraises an extraordinary artist, a figure who fascinated his contemporaries. He is the sinister sculptor of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, the dashing Byronic hero of Aldous Huxley's Chrome Yellow, and the egotistical painter of Katherine Mansfield's Je ne parle pas Francais. Gertler was admired and encouraged by Walter Sickert, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Henry Moore. He was championed by the flamboyant Lady Ottoline Morrell, and his magnificent haunting pictures were keenly collected. Yet despite his seeming ease in London's society, he himself felt his Jewishness and his working-class background as insuperable barriers, and his artistic ambition gradually alienated him even from the people among whom he'd grown up. He found no happiness and at the age of 48 killed himself. A few weeks before his death he had dinner with Virginia Woolf and impressed her with his fanatical devotion to his art. Hearing of his death she wondered if he had been perhaps too rigid, too self-centred, too honest and too narrow to be happy. But with this intellect and interest she asked why did the personal life become too painful This is one of the questions Sarah MacDougall explores in her life of this complex man, whose powerful images, like the Merry-go-round or the Creation of Eve have lost none of their disturbing eloquence.
Full Product Details
Author: Sarah MacDougall
Publisher: John Murray Press
Imprint: John Murray Publishers Ltd
Dimensions:
Width: 16.50cm
, Height: 24.20cm
, Length: 4.00cm
Weight: 0.806kg
ISBN: 9780719557996
ISBN 10: 0719557992
Pages: 413
Publication Date: 27 June 2002
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
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Reviews
'Gertler is by birth an absolute East End Jew... He is rather beautiful... his mind is deep and simple, and I think he's got the feu sacre.' Edward Marsh, writing to Rupert Brooke; 'By my own ambitions I am cut off from my family and class and by them I have been raised to equal a class I hate! They do not understand me, nor I them, so I am an outcast.' Mark Gertler to Carrington
Mark Gertler was a British artist whose best work was done in the 1920s and '30s, and who committed suicide in 1939. Although one or two of his paintings are familiar to anyone with an interest in art (notably his anti-war painting 'The Merry-go-Round', now hanging in Tate Modern), for the most part he has been unjustly neglected until now. A child prodigy, he was born into a Jewish family in an East End slum. His enormous talent was recognized by the Slade School of Art, from which he emerged labelled a genius, to be taken up rapidly by fashionable London. His main interest to the general reader is his connection with Bloomsbury as a protege of Lady Ottoline Morrell and a friend or acquaintance of D H Lawrence, Kathleen Mansfield, Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf - all of whom portrayed him as a fictional character in their novels. The main drama of his life was his love affair with fellow-painter Dora Carrington, herself violently in love with the writer Lytton Strachey. When the latter died, Carrington committed suicide. Gertler himself descended into poverty, illness and neglect, and eventually killed himself. It sounds a depressing story, and in many ways was; but the mercurial and charismatic Gertler is a gift to a biographer, and with a surrounding cast of remarkable and brilliant eccentrics it would take a much less skilled writer than Sarah MacDougall not to make a fascinating story of his life. She stresses the fact that her book is not a monograph on Gertler's paintings, but she makes a strong case for his art, and one hopes that her book will do something to place Gertler in a position he has never yet quite held - as a significant British painter of the early 20th century. (Kirkus UK)
Author Information
Sarah MacDougall is an art historian who has been stuyding and lecturing on Gertler for more than ten years. This is her first book.
