Walter Sickert

This resolutely modern artist, who chose enigmatic and often perturbing subjects, is poorly represented in French collections. This despite the fact that Sickert forged artistic and personal ties with many French artists and brought to England a manner of painting shaped by the time he spent in Paris. The exhibition is therefore an opportunity to (re)discover a unique artist who had a decisive impact on English figurative painting, notably that of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.
Very provocative, in the context of a relatively corseted English academic art, Walter Sickert painted unusual subjects such as music hall scenes, or later, de-eroticised nudes stripped of all glamour in poor Camden Town interiors. His contemporaries were struck by the artist’s choice of colours - as virtuoso as strange, inherited from training with Whistler - and disconcerting framing. From 1890, Sickert travelled more regularly to Paris and Dieppe, eventually settling in the seaside resort from 1898 to 1905. He was heavily influenced by the French art scene and became close to Edgar Degas, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Pierre Bonnard, Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro.

At the end of his career, between the two world wars, Sickert innovated by turning news photographs into paintings, a process largely taken up in the 1950s by artists. While he never crossed the threshold into abstraction, Sickert unceasingly provoked the art world and the public with his iconographic and pictorial inventions. Indeed, the legacy of his art is the lasting mark it left on the work of many artists for generations to come, notably that of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.

The exhibition is organised with Tate Britain and Petit Palais, Paris Musées.