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Authors: Sebastian Faulks
Tags: General, Biography & Autobiography
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captured the visceral effect of the best of Wood’s pictures: sophistication in simplicity, Modernism in an English idiom, the exhilaration of something bright and joyful achieved in a mysterious and oddly menacing way.
Whatever happened at St Ives in the late summer of 1926, Winifred Nicholson and Kit Wood were both right to see it as a turning point. In Winifred Nicholson’s mythology of Wood’s life it was the first of a succession of summers in which he created the body of his work. Wood, who did not see his own existence in such an organised way, responded to the change in the only manner he knew: more ambition, more work. His life was full of breakthroughs, new beginnings and moments when he believed he had at last discovered something durably exciting; as such it was typical of the lives of artists. Its peculiarity lay in the ferocity with which he drove on from each new departure.
At the end of 1926 Tony Gandarillas was given notice to quit his house on the Avenue Montaigne, and at the beginning of 1927 he moved to a sumptuous apartment in the rue des Marronniers in Passy, on the south-west outskirts of Paris. Wood was assigned a bedroom and a small studio, which he furnished with a low sofa made of mattresses and cushions, an easel and two tables – a long one he had brought from his old studio in the rue des Saints Peres, and a smaller one on which to draw. There was a terrace with a view of Paris and the barges moving slowly down the Seine. Wood found it all rather cramped, but the confined conditions suited the mood of self-denial he brought to what he increasingly referred to as his ‘struggle’.
‘I have never worked so hard before,’ he wrote to Winifred Nicholson, ‘and am really having a life and death struggle with it never as I knew before … So many ideas crush my brain that I seem never able to contemplate one than a thousand others disturb it.’ The intellectual weakness – an inability to order histhoughts – that he had previously diagnosed in himself made it more difficult for him to know which avenues to follow. One good painting did emerge from this period, and this was a self-portrait. It showed him standing on the balcony of his room with the roofs of Paris behind him. He was wearing a tight, multi-coloured sweater, and his clean features glowed with uncertain pride. It is the picture of a man who, as Gerald Reitlinger remarked, could just as easily have been a golfer: his huge red hands look swollen by the seaside winds, as though he had just won the President’s Putter at Rye.
His own pleasure in the picture led Wood to tell his mother how much he would like to paint a Wood family portrait, with his father depicted reading the Bible. His parents had confirmed their move to Wiltshire and Kit was enthusiastic; he thought that his father was ‘just the sort of man for country people who don’t like gushers’: no Diaghilev he.
The Nicholsons invited him to go and paint with them at Bankshead, their farmhouse in Cumberland, but Wood decided that, though he envied them the rustic idyll he imagined, he ought not to disturb the creative tranquillity he was enjoying in Paris. It was in fact a confused decision, because although he was spending many hours at the easel, he was too frantic to produce much that was worthwhile.
One of the things that was agitating him was the question of money. His increased renown as a painter had made little difference to his income. While Gandarillas gave him lodging and shared his meals if he was in Paris, he did not actually give him money, and his own finances were erratic. There was a temporary slump on the Paris stock market that foreshadowed a bigger cataclysm. While Wood paid no attention to such matters, the movement of capital did not leave him out of its considerations: it was hard to sell pictures to rich people worried about falling share prices.
The fruits of Wood’s frenzied spring in Paris went on show at the Beaux Arts Gallery in
Whatever happened at St Ives in the late summer of 1926, Winifred Nicholson and Kit Wood were both right to see it as a turning point. In Winifred Nicholson’s mythology of Wood’s life it was the first of a succession of summers in which he created the body of his work. Wood, who did not see his own existence in such an organised way, responded to the change in the only manner he knew: more ambition, more work. His life was full of breakthroughs, new beginnings and moments when he believed he had at last discovered something durably exciting; as such it was typical of the lives of artists. Its peculiarity lay in the ferocity with which he drove on from each new departure.
At the end of 1926 Tony Gandarillas was given notice to quit his house on the Avenue Montaigne, and at the beginning of 1927 he moved to a sumptuous apartment in the rue des Marronniers in Passy, on the south-west outskirts of Paris. Wood was assigned a bedroom and a small studio, which he furnished with a low sofa made of mattresses and cushions, an easel and two tables – a long one he had brought from his old studio in the rue des Saints Peres, and a smaller one on which to draw. There was a terrace with a view of Paris and the barges moving slowly down the Seine. Wood found it all rather cramped, but the confined conditions suited the mood of self-denial he brought to what he increasingly referred to as his ‘struggle’.
‘I have never worked so hard before,’ he wrote to Winifred Nicholson, ‘and am really having a life and death struggle with it never as I knew before … So many ideas crush my brain that I seem never able to contemplate one than a thousand others disturb it.’ The intellectual weakness – an inability to order histhoughts – that he had previously diagnosed in himself made it more difficult for him to know which avenues to follow. One good painting did emerge from this period, and this was a self-portrait. It showed him standing on the balcony of his room with the roofs of Paris behind him. He was wearing a tight, multi-coloured sweater, and his clean features glowed with uncertain pride. It is the picture of a man who, as Gerald Reitlinger remarked, could just as easily have been a golfer: his huge red hands look swollen by the seaside winds, as though he had just won the President’s Putter at Rye.
His own pleasure in the picture led Wood to tell his mother how much he would like to paint a Wood family portrait, with his father depicted reading the Bible. His parents had confirmed their move to Wiltshire and Kit was enthusiastic; he thought that his father was ‘just the sort of man for country people who don’t like gushers’: no Diaghilev he.
The Nicholsons invited him to go and paint with them at Bankshead, their farmhouse in Cumberland, but Wood decided that, though he envied them the rustic idyll he imagined, he ought not to disturb the creative tranquillity he was enjoying in Paris. It was in fact a confused decision, because although he was spending many hours at the easel, he was too frantic to produce much that was worthwhile.
One of the things that was agitating him was the question of money. His increased renown as a painter had made little difference to his income. While Gandarillas gave him lodging and shared his meals if he was in Paris, he did not actually give him money, and his own finances were erratic. There was a temporary slump on the Paris stock market that foreshadowed a bigger cataclysm. While Wood paid no attention to such matters, the movement of capital did not leave him out of its considerations: it was hard to sell pictures to rich people worried about falling share prices.
The fruits of Wood’s frenzied spring in Paris went on show at the Beaux Arts Gallery in
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