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The Fine Art Society will present an exhibition of 50 prints by Walter Sickert from 4th to 27th March. It will include many of Sickert's best-known images including Noctes Ambrosianae, The Old Bedford, Jack Ashore, Ennui, The New Bedford, The New Tie and "That Old-Fashioned Mother of Mine". Prices range from £750 - £20,000,
Most of Sickert’s prints were never published in editions and many exist in only a handful of proofs. He was an experimental artist and the invention and development of his images did not always follow a conventional sequence. A number of the works are drawn from the Leicester Galleries Collection and the Ruth and Joseph Bromberg Collection, the two largest private collections of Sickert prints which The Fine Art Society acquired.
No other British artist of his time created a series of images so unmistakably his own. It is not a matter of style or technique, but of the ideas which underlie his pictures. Having invented an image, Sickert proceeded to simplify it and reduce it to the barest elements necessary to convey it. In subjects drawn from the theatre and scenes of domestic life, he created images which are unforgettable and whose titles become part of the work.
Some of Sickert’s images were intended to shock, as was the case with his studies of the female nude with a clothed man. He loved contemporary music and the Music Hall. He found subjects on the stage, in the audience and in the fabric of the buildings themselves. He depicted scenes of domestic life and from the city around him. He also used photographs. In these respects he had much in common with the Pop artists of the 1960s, but it was in his choice of subjects that his work had its greatest impact on later artists. In depicting the popular, the ordinary and even sordid aspects of life, he provided an example for Bacon, Freud, Auerbach and artists who have followed them.
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