Augustus John (98 page)

Back in the mellowness of Fryern Court, he racked his brains, consulted maps, looked up trains and boats, and, retrieving a plan from the spring of 1912, settled on Venice. His last illuminating weeks in Italy had been nearly twenty-two years ago. Now, entering at another great centre of Italian painting, he seems to have tried a similar experiment. With him travelled his daughter Vivien, aged eighteen, ‘to keep an eye on the money’.
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John, ‘determined to see all the famous paintings’, spent hours in the Venetian churches, looking at the Tiepolo frescoes at San Francesco della Vigna, the Titians and the Bellini triptych at the Frari, the huge works by Tintoretto at Santa Maria dell’Orto, the Veronese ceiling in San Sebastiano. He was curious about the Ferrarese painters of the fifteenth century with their unusual dry style, and made expeditions to Ferrara to study Pisanello and Piero della Francesca, and the grand fantasies of Francesco del Cossa with their vivid naturalistic detail. There was much to enchant him, but past masterpieces no longer seemed capable of reviving his own work. ‘I rather felt I was a few centuries late for Venice,’ he wrote, ‘but all the same it was wonderful.’ Possibly these pictures showed up his limitations too painfully; or perhaps he had cast a shadow over the past, or simply let trivialities and enjoyments get in the way. ‘I saw many pictures but left many unseen,’ he wrote, ‘and I met a lot of people I knew there some of whom I would prefer to have avoided.’
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On landing at the steps of his hotel the first day, he had been hailed from a passing gondola by Sacheverell Sitwell’s wife, Georgia. From that moment, word getting round, he was sucked into ‘the maelstrom of Venetian society’, he wrote to Dodo (29 August 1933). ‘…the place is full of bores, buggers and bums of all kinds. Vivien is greatly in request and there are various optimistic members of the local aristocracy on her
tracks. Conditions are not favourable for painting and money goes like water, so I think an early return is indicated.’ Much of this time Vivien was in tears, and John, though generally protective, burst into sudden fits of anger, complaining that her clothes were
too smart.
‘The air of Venice was getting me down,’ he acknowledged. ‘I became more and more indolent… it was the people I tired of most. My God, what a set!… I was seeing less of Vivien… but at last even my daughter agreed it was time to depart.’
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He had done little painting. What eluded him lay in his receding imagination. A yearning for distant scenes and the impulse towards flight overwhelmed him. They overwhelmed him, but he could not act on them. Like a giant ship stranded in shallow water, its propellers gyrating in the air, he stayed.

But one last voyage awaited him – had awaited him, by the time he embarked, for twenty-six years. ‘I think Jamaica would be a nice place to go and work,’ he had written to Dorelia. That was in September 1911. ‘I think of going to Jamaica,’ he repeated in a letter to Vera Stubbs on 4 June 1929. By 1936, the effects of his renewed drinking had led him to consult an occultist who proposed casting John’s horoscope. This exercise led to the prediction that he would turn up soon in one of the British colonies. ‘I would have been sorry to leave the astrologer’s forecast unfulfilled and his prophetic gift in dispute,’ John wrote. ‘…I decided [on] a visit to Jamaica.’

Dodo was set on joining the adventure. With them went Vivien, Francis Macnamara’s daughter Brigit, now ‘une grosse blonde… très aimable’,
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and a mysterious child called Tristan, also blond but aged two and a half, who ‘imagines himself to be the Captain of this ship’.
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The tropics suited John. Though the island was ‘altogether too fertile’, parts of it reminded him of North Wales. The internal conflict he carried wherever he went externalized itself in Jamaica very satisfactorily. The enemy were the bridge-players, golf club members, and the management of the American United Fruit Company. His allies were the natives. There were similar distractions to those in Venice, but he controlled them better. ‘We are in some danger of being launched into the beau monde of Jamaica. Nobody believes I am serious when I tell them I am only interested in painting the coloured people,’ he wrote to Tristan’s mother, Mavis de Vere Cole (10 March 1937). ‘…I shall have a mass of work done before I am finished.’ Jamaica activated him more than Italy had done, perhaps because the past could speak to him more immediately through these living models than through the pictures of Renaissance Venice. It appeared to him that these Jamaicans still inhabited a freer, more natural world than the
embattled, illiberal, over-policed states which modern industrialized countries had created and were attempting to impose on them.

To gain extra time for himself, Jamaica being so expensive, he dispatched ‘the females and Tristan’ back to England after a month, and continued working alone until the rains came six weeks later. ‘I hated leaving you,’ Dorelia wrote on board the SS
Aciguani,
‘but doubtless you are getting on very well and doing the work you wanted to.’ In
Chiaroscuro,
where he devotes over ten pages to this time,
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John records that he felt ‘anything but satisfied’ with his painting. Like gypsies, the native Jamaicans were elusive. In a perfect world he would have built a ‘house of mud, mahogany and palms’ and lived there as one of them. Instead – the ultimate degradation – he was taken for a visiting politician. Yet, the place ‘suits me and stimulates me’, he decided. ‘I am painting with a renewal of energy quite remarkable and will not cease till I have accomplished much.’
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With the rains ‘a great gloom descended upon me, almost depriving me of volition’. He returned on a banana boat to England and Fryern and struggled to work up these pictures before his memories slid behind an invisible screen of habit. His portraits of ‘Aminta’, ‘Daphne’, ‘Phyllis’ and many others delighted London when they were exhibited at Tooth’s Gallery in May and June 1938. The show, Dudley Tooth noted in his diary, ‘has been a tremendous success, nearly everything having been sold at prices between £200 and £550’ [equivalent to between £5,700 and £15,600 in 1996]. Among the purchasers were J. B. Priestley, Mrs Syrie Maugham, Vincent Massey, Oswald Birley, Sir Lawrence Phillips and Sir Stafford Cripps, the announcement of whose purchase was, to his horror, splashed across the
Evening Standard.

These Jamaican pictures, constructed rather as a modeller builds up his clay to make shapes, represent the most vigorous body of John’s work over the last thirty years of his career. The exhibition gave art critics an opportunity to reflect upon the curious narrative of his career and find reasons for its decline.

The most hostile critic was Clive Bell. ‘If only Augustus John had been serious,’ he wrote in the
New Statesman,
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‘what a fine painter he might have been.’ Bell’s review was an attempt to reconcile his early admiration for John’s paintings with this later disappointment. In a few of the Jamaican portraits, where the ‘impression though banal is vivid, the execution telling, and the placing happy, one finds the ghost of that great talent with which Augustus John was blest,’ Bell argued. ‘As a rule, however, there is less talent than trick; and there is no thought at all.’ Bell’s conclusion was that John lacked the intellectual powers of composition that were the mature test of an artist’s ability. Undoubtedly he scored some successes, but they had ‘the air of a fluke’.

In the
Spectator,
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Anthony Blunt confronted the same question with more difficulty. ‘Everyone is agreed on the fact that Augustus John was born with a quite exceptional talent for painting – some even use the word genius, – and almost everyone is agreed that he has in some way wasted it,’ Blunt began. ‘…[But] it is extremely hard to see just where John’s paintings fail. For myself I find it impossible to put my finger on the point.’ Instead of a point, Blunt drew a line of gradually lessening vitality and concentration along John’s career. For him the great work, akin to that of masters from the past, was ‘represented by the portrait heads in two coloured chalks which date from the turn of the century.

‘In these drawings John gave proof of a quality which does not seem to reappear in his work, namely, humility in the face of nature. He is not prepared to take nature as the basis for a technical experiment, but is willing to follow her in all her tiresome intricacies. These early drawings have a sort of industrious observation which distinguishes them from all the later productions. For even in the oil sketches of the next period John is already letting himself go in a sort of mannerism, though the mannerism is so brilliant that one is at first willing to accept it as a serious basis for painting.’

John portraits, Blunt argued, were based on a sound technical brilliance that ‘will stand the most minute study, and even study over a long period, without becoming thin. It is only in his methods of dealing with the psychological problems presented by his sitters that his shorthand appears. Even in such a masterly work as the Suggia one grows tired of the over-emphatic gesture before one has finished admiring the brilliance of the drawing and the brush-work.’

John’s recent work, his portraits and figure-studies, were solidly constructed, Blunt acknowledged, but had lost the brilliance of his earlier paintings without regaining the meticulous care of his initial drawings. Blunt likened his last landscapes to work by Matisse and Derain: ‘to Matisse in the insubstantial flatness of the objects, to Derain in much of the colour.’

Blunt ended his review more handsomely than Bell. ‘It is only because his gifts are so great that one is forced to judge him by the very highest, that he seems to fail.’ Both Bell and Blunt were attempting to come to terms with the corrosion of a predominantly lyrical talent which had interpreted landscape, and figures in landscape, or the solitary figure drawn in preparation for placing in the landscape, through poetic or visionary eyes. But as Richard Shone later pointed out, ‘this lyrical mode belongs essentially to youth (as so often in poetry) and it is rare… for
the artist to effect a successful transformation as he grows older’
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– though this was the transformation Yeats had achieved.

To his old sparring partner Wyndham Lewis, John appeared to have briefly regained something of his youth, and he gave these Jamaican pictures a splendid celebration in the
Listener:

‘As one passes in review these blistered skins of young African belles, with their mournful doglike orbs, and twisted lips like a heavyweight pugilist, one comes nearer to the tragedy of this branch of the human race than one would in pictures more literary in intention...

Mr John opens his large blue eyes, and a dusky head bursts into them. His… brushes stamp out on the canvas a replica of what he sees. But what he sees (since he is a very imaginative man) is all the squalor and beauty of the race – of this race of predestined underdogs...

Nature is for him like a tremendous carnival, in the midst of which he finds himself. But there is nothing of the spectator about Mr John. He is very much a part of the saturnalia. And it is only because he enjoys it so tremendously that he is moved to report upon it – in a fever of optical emotion, before the object selected passes on and is lost in the crowd.’
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Over thirty years earlier, in the second issue of
Blast,
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Lewis had faulted his friend for his
fin-de-si
è
cle
leanings, lack of discipline and premature artistic impotence. In a letter written shortly afterwards he went on to accuse him of dropping into the rather stagnant trough that followed the heights of Victorianism. ‘You begin by shipwrecking yourself on all sorts of romantic reefs,’ he had written. ‘…Whether a craft is still sea-worthy after such buccaneering I dont know. But lately you have not, to put it mildly, advanced in your work. That you will enter the history books, you know, of course! Blast is a history book, too. You will not be a legendary and immaculate hero, but a figure of controversy, nevertheless.’
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It was John’s place in art history that Lewis now began to re-examine. When looking back along ‘a narrative of my career up to date’ in
Rude Assignment,
he told a story from the Great War. ‘When Mars with his mailed finger showed me a shell-crater and a skeleton, with a couple of shivered tree-stumps behind it, I was still in my “abstract” element. And before I knew quite what I was doing I was drawing with loving care a signaller corporal to plant upon the lip of the shell-crater.’
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In other words, he was doing a John drawing and placing John’s work in the margins of Vorticism.

Four years later, in
The Demon of Progress in the Arts,
Lewis drew a lesson from this experience in a passage that explains how John’s example at its worst – the attitudinizing properties of ‘your stage-gypsies… [and]
your boring Borrovian cult of the Gitane’ – off which Lewis had ricocheted into Vorticism in 1913, later helped him in its better aspects to escape from the inhumanity of prolonged abstraction. ‘What I was headed for, obviously,’ he wrote, ‘was to fly away from the world of men, of pigs, of chickens and alligators, and go to live in the unwatered moon, only a moon sawed up into square blocks, in the most alarming way. What an escape I had!’
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John had long ceased to be a champion of the young. To them he appeared a figure without modern interest, someone who had ‘made a pact with social success at the expense of painting’, though he barked beautifully before parties of lion hunters. But when Lewis’s young disciples such as Geoffrey Grigson questioned his good opinion of such a ‘vulgar art-school draughtsman with a provincial mind’,
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Lewis found it difficult to make them understand what John represented to artists of his generation. He had buried ‘the mock naturalists and pseudo-impressionists’ and, as the legitimate successor of Beardsley, had contributed a new vitality to the last few years of the nineteenth century and the first dozen years of the twentieth.