Mark
Gertler (1891-1939)
Merry-Go-Round ; 76' x 56'; Tate Gallery London,
finished
by September 1916 and exhibited at the London Group 1917.
Born in Spitalfields, East London;
1906, long periods of sleeplessness and depression; , attended art
classes Regent Street Polytechnic;
1908 to Slade School,met Dora Carrington, C.R.W.Nevinson, Paul Nash,
David Bomberg, won Slade Scholarship, first prize for Head Painting;
1912 joined New English Art School, visited Paris, early influence
of Piero, now allegiance to the Modern School and particularly Derain
;
1915 joined the Morell/Lawrence circle and left the East End for good.Moved
to Penn Studio, Hampstead.
1919 first visit to Paris, change in his art from the depiction of
the individual to the influence of the Ecole de Paris.
" Gertler is by birth an absolute little East End Jew.... He is rather
beautiful and has a funny little shiny black fringe; his mind is deep
and simple, and I think he has the feu sacre." Edward Marsh 1913.
The talk addresses the problematic subject matter of the painting.
Why is the image of the Merry Go Round associated with hysteria rather
than happiness ?
What is the significance of the painting in its contemporary context ?
What influenced its extraordinary imagery ?
The Cylic in pictorial imagery,
Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951).
Gertler's early subject matter in the East End.
Early work, Rabbi and Daughter 1912.
The influence of Diaghilev and Petrouchka, 1912. The
Benois sets for Petrouchka, see A.G.Houbigant, Moeurs et Costumes des
Russes ,Paris 1817, (01) lithographs of Russian
scenes upon which benois seems to have based his celebrated Fairground
sets for Diaghilev.
The influence of D.H.Lawrence, Women in Love ,1921,written
from 1912 and The Rainbow ,Sept. 1915
The Home Front during the First World War, the early
bombing raids on London, the early shelters in the Underground
Effect on civilian morale. (01. 02, 03)
The nature of Gertler's creativity.
" You ask what is the matter with me ? Well, it is something serious
- the greatest crisis in my life - and you know what I have already suffered
in the past. I fact for the time being I see no solution - the trouble
is- my work - what is my value as an artist / What have I in me after
all ? Is there anything there worth while after all ? That is the point
- I doubt myself - I doubt myself terribly - after all these years of
labour and you know how I worked - so so hard with my blood and I have
lived and fed up my work - my work was by faith....." letter to William
Rothenstein, c1925. September 1939, dies by his own hand.
1. Responses to the painting .
1.1"With its harsh flickering restlessness the painting seemed to
be a comment on Mark's life in the various scenes through which he had
passed - Whitechapel slum, young artist's Bohemia, fashionable society,
the Garsington intelligentsia. It was impossible too to look at these
mechanical soldiers going round and round without recalling the horrors
of the deadlocked Western Front....." William Rothenstein, Men and
Memories 1942.
1.2 "In this extraordinary picture the folk art figures express,
although in a more sophisticated fashion, the brutality that the boisterous
jollity of the traditional Punch scarcely masks.... Never again as far
as I am aware did his folk art figures assume so grand or so sinister
a form." John Rothenstein.
1.3 "Your terrible and beautiful picture[in reproduction] has just
come. This is the first picture you have ever painted : it is the best
modern picture I have ever seen : I think it is great and true. But it
is horrible and terrifying. I'm not sure I wouldn't be too frightened
to come and look at the original." D.H.Lawrence.
2.Gertler on Art and Creativity .
2.1 "I paint pictures which seem to me wonderful but no one understands
them." Mark Gertler, May 1916. "Ideas for future pictures come
to me very often and these ideas are so mysterious and wonderful that
when they come over me - they come in waves - I get so excited and feel
so physically weak that I can hardly stand." MG to Edward Marsh,
August 17th, 1915.
2.2 "I get amazing visions for pictures, some of them too complicated
to paint but wonderful as ghosts. I got wonderful ideas here on Bank Holidays.
Multitudes of people. Bright feathers, swinging in and out of the clouds
in coloured boats... a blaze of whirling colour; the effect would be something
like a rainbow. It would be wonderful if one could give the effect of
the whirl and the excitement, but it's too complicated an idea to paint
yet." Gertler, letter to Carrington, 1915 written in Hampstead Heath.
2.3 "He was baffled by this association of art with things like politics
and music-halls, which he had always accepted as part of the world's constitution,
but essentially unimportant. He had no organised mental life.His ideas
came direct from his instincts to his mind, and were used for immediate
purposes or dropped back again to return when wanted." G.Cannan,
Mendel.
3. Appropriate texts; the image of the moth and the candle .
3.1 "This world in which she lived was like a circle lighted by a
lamp. This lighted area, lit up by man's completest consciousness, she
thought was all the world : that here all was disclosed for ever. Yet
all the time within the darkness she had been aware of points of light,
like the eyes of wild beasts, gleaming, penetrating, vanishing. And her
soul had acknowledged in a great heave of terror only the outer darkness.
The inner circle of light in which she lived and moved, wherein the trains
rushed and the factories ground out their machine produce and the plants
and the animals worked by the light of science and knowledge, suddenly
it seemed like an area under an arc lamp, wherein the moths and children
played in their security of blinding light, not even knowing there was
any darkness because they stayed in the light..... Nevertheless the darkness
wheeled about, with grey shadow-shapes of wild beasts, and also with dark
shadow shapes of the angels whom the light fenced out, as it fenced out
the more familiar beasts of darkness."
D.H.Lawrence, The Rainbow ,1915, of Ursula Brangwyn.
Lawrence as an admirer of Thomas Hardy would not have missed the use of
the image used to describe Tess in Tess of the Durbevilles .
3.2"You seem to me to be flying like a moth into a fire. I beg you
don't let the current of work carry you on so strongly that it will destroy
you oversoon.." DHL to MG
3.3 "He lived in a circle of light into which like moths came timid,
blinking, lovable figures, and he loved them ; but they passed on and
were lost in the tumultuous heaving darkness of life, into which alone
he could not enter." Gilbert Cannan, Mendel ,1916.
Slide PUNCH May 26th 1909 p.363, and an example of much interest in airship
question. Here Punch makes light but there was considerable unease at
airships creeping in under the national defences.
4. Appropriate texts, the Zeppelins over Wartime London - the
Terrors of the Underground .
4.1 "Last night when we were coming home the guns broke out, and
there was a noise of bombs. Then we saw the Zeppelin above us, just ahead,
amid a gleaming of clouds; high up, like a bright golden finger, quite
small among a fragile incandescence of clouds. And underneath it were
splashes of fire as the shells fired from earth burst. Then there were
flashes near the ground - and the shaking noise. It was like Milton -
then there was a war in heaven. But it was not angels. It was that small
golden Zeppelin, like a long oval world up high. Then the small, long
ovate luminary, the new world in the heavens disappeared again."
DHL letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, Sept.9 1915. Byron Villas, Hampstead.
4.2 "The shelters belonged, it was affirmed, mainly to the poorer
type of alien in East London; it seemed to be implied that no true born
native would be so un-British as to take cover from falling bombs - not
at all events in a Tube station. Raids being shorter in those days, the
shelterers did not have to sit it out for the whole night. They whiled
away the time riding back and forth in the train..... returning of course
to their starting point and no fares paid. The Inner Circle as it was
then called, was a particular favourite." J.A.B.Hamilton, Britain's
Railways in World War I, 1967.
4.3 "He had never been in the Tube and, one day, with a shilling
borrowed from Harry, it seemed appropriate to him to plunge into the bowels
of the earth.The oppression of the air, the flash of the stations as he
moved through them, suited his mood, fantastic and futile." G.Cannan,
Mendel.
(04)
Something of the grandeur of watching the Zeppelins go by- from an advert
for the Ethyly Corporation, 1952, 17 x 24cms.
4.4"
It seems to me the stark truth one has inside one is all that matters
whether it is paint, or books or life. ... I saw the Daily Mirror today
today - the Zeppelin wrecks etc. How exhausted one is by all this fury
of strident lies and foul death......." Lawrence to Gertler Sept
1916.
BOOKLIST
For the standard biography see
John Woodeson,
Mark Gertler Biography of a Painter , 1972;
Mark Gertler Selected Letters ,edited by Noel Carrington
1965;
The Letters and Diaries of Dora Carrington edited Noel
Carrington;
John Rothenstein Modern English Painters , Vol ii, 1956;
Gilbert Cannan, Mendel A Story of Youth ,published October
1916;
Robert Gathorne-Hardy, Ottoline, the Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline
Morrell 1963;
Osbert Sitwell,
Great Morning , 1948;
and
George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England,
Paladin 1966
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