Authors: Michael Holroyd
No one cared very much in the last twenty-five years of John’s life how he drew and painted: it was what he stood for, as the most celebrated British artist in the first part of the twentieth century, that counted. This was why, for example, he was formally associated (along with John Nash, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant) with a new school of drawing and painting, started in 1937 by Claude Rogers, Victor Pasmore and William Coldstream to free the study of drawing and painting from the teaching of the applied arts and commercial and industrial design. He had become somewhat ludicrously what Yeats called ‘a public event’: the sort of famous person for whom admirers liked to knit ‘tortoiseshell earflaps’ or a ‘pair of blinders’ to wear ‘when Ladies invite you to teas’; someone asked to paint the portrait of a dog (‘I could bring him to see you at any time’), or to judge the Fordingbridge Cricket Club’s Beauty Competition (‘select at your leisure among all the ladies in the room, during dances and intervals’).
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This comic celebrity irritated young people, but amused Lewis. In the course of their teasing and testing relationship, Lewis often mocked John for having become ‘an institution like Madame Tussaud’s’, inquiring at one point if he was yet ‘a Futuriste’ or whether he planned to advance on the Louvre and ‘put your foot through the Mona Lise’. And John would intermittently acknowledge that such thrusts were ‘salutary and well-deserved’.
In
Rude Assignment
Lewis pays tribute to John’s intelligence and wide reading. Yet John’s art was curiously unallied to his intelligence. He was,
Lewis told Grigson, ‘an Eye’ and if the Eye ‘happened to fall on the right object’ the results were good. Both of them did too many potboilers, too much undistinguished work for money – John more than Lewis. But for all their quarrelling, this patriarch and his cadet were kindred spirits with a common ‘Enemy’ in the previous generation, and they reinforced in each other Oscar Wilde’s belief that ‘it is only shallow people who do not judge from appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.’
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As if to avoid comparison with past work, and bring about a rebirth of his talent, John occasionally tried out new genres. In 1929 the theatre producer C. B. Cochran had agreed to employ him as designer for the controversial second act of Sean O’Casey’s play
The Silver Tassie.
John had got to know O’Casey through a Belfast friend of Gogarty’s called William McElroy (‘a kind of minor Horatio Bottomley’, John called him), who occupied himself as coal merchant, impresario and part-racehorse owner (‘the left hind leg, I think it was’). The three of them would dine together at the Queen’s Restaurant off Sloane Square, and despite the fact that both John and O’Casey liked to dominate the conversation, they got on well. ‘He’s a splendid fellow, & utterly unspoilt,’ O’Casey wrote in 1926. ‘Says I’m a great Dramatist & slaps me on the back for breaking every damned rule of the Stage.’
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That year John painted two portraits of O’Casey, one of them completed in an all-day sitting between eleven o’clock in the morning and half-past four in the afternoon. ‘Uncanny, powerful, embarrassingly vivid,’ O’Casey described it: ‘an alert concentration wearing a look of (to me) shuddering agony’.
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O’Casey already owned a John ‘Head of a Gitana’ and, on his marriage to the beautiful Eileen Reynolds, John gave the couple one of his portraits – ‘a princely gift’ which they hung in their sitting-room over the mantelpiece.
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It was Eileen O’Casey who had put forward John’s name for
The Silver Tassie.
She called on him at Mallord Street like ‘an angel rushing in where a devil feared to tread’.
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There was, she noticed, ‘a debutante trying to get in, ringing the bell, appearing at various windows’. John ignored this as they talked over the project. The play was fine, but he had qualms. ‘I have never done one before; I don’t really think I could.’ He was, Eileen remembered, ‘extremely shy, though as ever courteous and complimentary, for he liked good-looking women. This helped me to plead my cause.’ At the end of the afternoon, she asked: ‘Have I persuaded you?’ ‘I’m afraid you have,’ he replied.
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Everything seemed to go with surprising ease. ‘I have the Silver Tassie with me,’ he had written from Cap Ferrat on 3 February 1929, ‘and I
don’t see much difficulty about the second act’. O’Casey had described this act in detail: a War Zone, its ‘jagged and lacerated ruin of what was once a monastery’, the life-size crucifix, stained-glass window, and great howitzer with ‘long sinister barrel now pointing towards the front at an angle of forty-five degrees’. In a note he had added: ‘Every feature of the scene seems a little distorted from its original appearance.’ All this approximated closely to what John had wanted to depict as a war artist and, given this new impetus, he turned to his sketchbooks of France. But when Raymond Massey, who was directing the play, called on John in September, he found him distracted and nervous, with ‘not only an open mind but a blank one’. He was shown some of the large charcoal drawings John had done as a war artist, and they settled on one of a ruined chapel as the basis of the design. Massey gave a number of John’s war sketches – ‘frightening, grizzly and jagged, O’Casey’s scene was there’ – to the scene painters and builders, but he wanted John himself to paint the Madonna for the stained-glass window. His hopes ran out on set-up day when he made alternative arrangements for a scene painter to do the work – at which point John, ‘his great black hat cocked over his forehead’, lurched into the theatre, sauntered down the aisle, climbed unsteadily on to the stage flooded in harsh work-lights, and silently surveyed the bone-yard scene. Then he took up a stick of charcoal, moved towards the window frame lying on the floor, and made a firm stroke on the oiled silk.
‘He worked as though possessed and for more than two hours he never looked up,’ Raymond Massey remembered. ‘…the crew watched in fascination. At last it was done. He moved to the side of the stage and stood waiting. Without a word, two stagehands lifted the window piece and braced it in position. The master electrician connected the cable and set the lights for act 2. And there shone the Madonna of
The Silver Tassie…
We cheered Augustus John. He did not hear us; he just stood there looking at his scene. He was pleased with it. He left, swaying slightly.’
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O’Casey too was pleased. He had been nervous of Eileen’s impetuosity, then anxious over John’s commitment to his play. But the overpowering
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effect of the design delighted him, – and also Bernard Shaw, who pronounced ‘the second act a complete success for both of you’.
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John also felt excited by what seemed a new arena in which to exercise his talent. He was starting to design the sets of Constant Lambert’s ballet
Pomona
for the Camargo Society, when he went into Preston Deanery Hall. In the following years there were many rumours of his re-entry into the theatre, but all came to nothing until, in 1935, at Cochran’s suggestion, he agreed to do the scenery and costumes for J. M. Barrie’s
The Boy David.
The changes that had overtaken John in the seven years between the two plays are very clear. On 25 October 1935, Cochran sent John a letter confirming the details of their arrangement. Less than two months later, he was sending out an SOS for Ernst Stern, who had been the chief designer to Max Reinhardt and was the most professional artist in the theatre of his day. With the exception of Barrie, everyone in the production had taken to John at once. ‘John, in his extraordinary innocence of the theatre, was never too proud to defer to their expertise,’ recorded Malcolm Easton. ‘On them, and on all Cochran’s brilliant band of technicians, he smiled benevolently. From the benevolence, however, proceeded few practical results… John’s efforts to envisage Barrie’s characters rarely got further than the upper half of the body. When it was a question of the precise cut of the skirt of a tunic, exact length of a cloak, or clothing of the legs, it seemed that, like Byron, he
never looked so low.
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These tactics had driven the needlewomen to despair, given Barrie a high temperature and aggravated Cochran’s arthritis for which, at rehearsals, he wore a splint. It was to everyone’s relief, John’s included, that Stern took over these costumes.
To Barrie’s irritation, John had depicted Bethlehem as a Provençal village, decorated with terraces, boulders and cypress trees. The principal set, and John’s main contribution to the play, was the Israelite outpost of Act II, scene ii. For this he provided ‘a dark and lowering sky, with immense rocks in the foreground, from which descended a slender waterfall, giving rise to the brook from the bed of which David chose the pebbles he was to sling at Goliath’.
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Although attending a few rehearsals – ‘an impressive figure splendidly sprawled across two stalls’
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– he did not travel up to see the opening night at Edinburgh. The greatest problem that night had been how to force the actors on and off stage. ‘Having delivered their exit line,’ John Brunskill, the scenery builder, remembered, ‘they were forced to clamber over a number of rocks before getting off stage.’ By the end of the scene the stage was crowded with these bruised and scrambling actors attempting to reach or retire from their lines. In a desperate move to halt these gymnastics, Cochran again called on Stern, this time to redesign the set. Numbers of rock units were scrapped, the sky was replaced with a white canvas cloth, the inset scenes altered and, worst of all, John’s waterfall – ‘how charmingly it glittered and fell!’ – dried up. Stern, who respected John, describing him as ‘the typical painter, and we understand one another’, hated this work which, he felt, went against the ‘artists’ freemasonry’. Such was the guilt that no one dared to tell John of the alterations. He arrived at His Majesty’s Theatre for the London première on 12 December 1936 happily ignorant of the fearful mutilations.
The change to Act I had been minimal, and John sat through it undisturbed. But when the curtain rose on Act II, he rose from his seat, left the auditorium, and stayed for the rest of the performance in the bar, pondering this betrayal. ‘This play was a complete flop from the start, and I wasn’t sorry.’ But later, having been handsomely paid by Cochran, he admitted: ‘It dawned on me too late that I had neither the technique nor the physical attributes for this sort of work, apart from the question of my artistic ability.’ Stern’s final comment, which achieves unconscious irony, corroborates this: ‘How I envy John, as he stands in front of his easel, palette and brushes in hand.’
Alone with his easel, palette and brushes, John could only point to failures in geography, to weather and viruses. Also studios. ‘A sympathetic studio is
very
hard to find,’ he admitted to Lord Duveen’s daughter, Dolly. In June 1935 he borrowed Vanessa Bell’s studio; by November that year he had moved into Euphemia’s house at 49 Glebe Place, Chelsea (later owned by Gerald Reitlinger and by Edward Le Bas); and in March 1938 he rented the ‘cottage’ in Primrose Codrington’s estate, famous for its garden, at Park House in South Kensington. From these places he came and went, tampering with their lighting then leaving them for good. In 1940, when bombs began falling on London, the top windows of Park Studio, fantastically illuminated in the night sky, were smashed, and John moved on to 33 Tite Street, in Chelsea, where Whistler and Sargent had lived, and where he rested in battered comfort throughout the Blitz.
‘My life seems to get more and more complicated,’ he wrote wonderingly.
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The multiplicity of studios, reflecting this confusion, extended beyond England. In 1936 Dorelia had rented, ‘for the large sum’ of twelve pounds a year, the Mas de Galeron, a little farmhouse ‘au ras des Alpilles’ behind ‘les Antiques’ at St-Rémy-de-Provence.
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Though it was merely a modest grey old building, ‘I really couldn’t resist it,’ she wrote to him from Cannes. ‘There are 3 large rooms and one smaller one,’ she added. ‘One would make a good studio for you. It is quite isolated with a rather rough track… There are grey rocks on one side, vines and olives and an immense view from the north… Why not come down?’
John went down for the first time in September 1937 and, despite his worst fears (imagining Dorelia might have gone mad), he loved it. The house was built into the hillside, its floors uneven, with small surprising rooms turning up round corners and down steps. Outside, a hot aromatic terrace, flanked by pine trees, overlooked a field of stones, olives and euphorbias. Above ran the chain of rocky Alpilles, dotted with green scrub and the plumes of cypress trees – ‘an endless sequence of exquisite landscapes’.
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Anyone who knows and likes this landscape will enjoy John’s paintings of it, recognize how accurately he has observed it. Yet these
paintings lack the inspirational quality of his early landscapes, and he confessed to his neighbour there, Marie Mauron, that ‘ces Alpilles attendent encore
leur
peintre – mais ce n’est pas moi. Regardez! Ces jeux de gris, de bleu, de rose, ces touffes de plantes aromatiques, en boules, taches, traits sur le roc de toutes couleurs insaisissables, me désespèrent.’
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The next year he went again, and once more in July 1939 with Dorelia, Vivien, Zoë and Tristan, intending to stay there three months. ‘Il n’y aura pas de guerre,’ Derain scoffed as the two artists sat peacefully drinking on the terrace of the Café des Variétés and watching the soldiers and horses crowd through the streets. ‘C’est une blague.’ But it was becoming, John suspected, ‘necessary to make a decision’. Eventually, responding to urgent telephone calls from Poppet (‘I told them there was a man called Hitler...’), Dorelia decided they must leave. They set off, John gaining maximum delay with the aid of dictionaries, by sending a long telegram to England in very correct French. ‘C’est la guerre! C’est la guerre!’ the farmers greeted them, as they fumed and thundered through the villages in a furious convoy of two cars. At Orléans they put up for one night, and while Dorelia and Tristan slept, John escorted Vivien and Zoë to a club run by a couple of spinsters from Kensington, and full of the jolliest girls. ‘And what do you do, sir?’ one of them asked John. ‘I am a ballet dancer,’ he replied.