Mr Philpot changes trains

from ROSA Issue 1 – Summer 2022

‘All the blues I ever dreamt of’

Glyn Philpot (1884-1937) was, in his popular heyday, widely considered to be the most talented artist of his generation, in an era when successful oil painters enjoyed celebrity status, and all the trappings that went with it.

In 1923 he became the youngest Royal Academician, having for some years exhibited much-praised paintings in the gallery’s Summer Show. He had already established a reputation as London’s most sought-after society portrait artist, the successor to John Singer Sargent, called upon to paint twelve or so lucrative likenesses a year, of the great and the good (and the rich and the famous) in England, and beyond. Stanley Baldwin. Sir Oswald Mosley. King Fuad of Egypt.

He also had frequent solo shows in London, selling his more personal paintings and sculptures (mostly of a symbolic nature, in classical, religious and historical settings), for significant – though significantly lower – sums.

On the face of it, Philpot was a traditionalist, his techniques reflecting the many hours he had spent studying the Old Masters at the National, the Louvre, and the Prado, and his extensive classical training in London and Paris. There was little hint of the twentieth century in his elegant society portraits, beautifully composed and drafted, and rich in glazed colour, which reflected his major influences, from Velázquez to Titian to Veronese.

The considerable sums of money he earned from his art enabled Philpot to enjoy a luxurious lifestyle, with a studio and flat in Holland Park (and, latterly, another in Montparnasse), and a country pile near Horsham in Sussex, with servants and a chauffeur. He was a tireless traveller, making several trips abroad a year, mostly to continental Europe, but also to the USA, and North Africa. He was good-natured and generous, subsidising the lifestyle of friends and family, particularly his long-term companion Vivian Forbes, a lesser artist who he met while on military service in WW1.

So why did he risk all this, when, in 1931, he ‘came out’ as a Modernist, largely eschewing his old style for something much sparser, and more stylised, and thus alienating most of his potential patrons, who wouldn’t want to be seen through such a ‘Jazz Age’ filter?

A closer analysis reveals that Philpot’s conversion wasn’t as abrupt as might first appear. Long before his celebrated shift of style, there had been hints of a more radical painter bubbling under the surface, in the subject matter and composition of his uncommissioned, personal paintings. He showed, for example, a predilection for painting unusually dignified portraits of Black, male subjects (particularly, from 1929, his muse and manservant Henry Thomas); his religious paintings were often painted from unconventional perspectives, including, in The Angel of the Annunciation (1925), Gabriel seen from the perspective of the Virgin Mary, in a suburban, Sussex setting. No-one had ever done anything like that before.

Right

Glyn Philpot, Balthazar, 1929

Oil on canvas

Private Collection

Below

Glyn Philpot, Resting Acrobats, 1924

Oil on canvas

Leeds Museums & Galleries

Given by HM Hepworth, 1934

UK/Bridgeman Images

Below right

Glyn Philpot, Siegfried Sassoon, 1917

Oil on canvas

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Philpot’s male gaze was aimed, largely, at male subjects. He was a homosexual, in an era when homosexuality was illegal in the eyes of both State and Church, and damningly taboo. Unable to be open about his sexuality in public, he increasingly explored his passion for the male figure on canvas. There is, thus, a marked homoeroticism to many of his portraits and paintings. Take his 1923 painting Penelope, whose real subject isn’t the titular abandoned wife of Odysseus, relegated to the farleft edge of the canvas, but three of her scantily clad suitors, hogging the limelight, a louche loitering triangle of unfulfilled fancy.

Several things happened, in the early thirties, that precipitated Philpot’s shift into a more Modernist style. In 1930 the painter was invited to be a juror for the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh, travelling across the Atlantic on the Mauretania with Henri Matisse to judge a competition eventually won by Pablo Picasso (with a portrait of his wife Olga). In the same year he exhibited a number of his (traditional) pre-1924 paintings in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale; the nearby German Pavilion displayed radical works by the likes of Otto Dix, and George Grosz. Did these two events make him start to feel a little ‘square’ about where he stood as an artist, already a dinosaur at the age of 45?

In 1931 Philpot took a flat and studio in Montparnasse, which was Modernist in design, and fitted with angular, Bauhaus-style furniture. And he took two trips to Berlin, where he was shown around the decadent and permissive nightlife scene – chronicled by Christopher Isherwood in his semifictional novels Goodbye to Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains – by a teenage German guide, Karl-Heinz Müller, who was to feature in several works. The series of paintings he produced in his Paris studio was markedly different from his previous work, in its style, subject matter, and setting.

The fruit of his newly styled labour was unveiled to the British public in two shows in 1932, which changed Philpot’s reputation for good. In the Royal Academy Summer Show, Aphrodite and Ascending Angel, both allegorical paintings, painted in a Modernist style in a modern setting (Philpot’s Paris apartment) led to much headscratching in the press, unsure of how to take this unexpected turn from the hitherto golden boy of British art. The art critic from The Scotsman, famously, proclaimed ‘Glyn Philpot goes Picasso’, stating the artist had ‘looked too long at, and caught infection from some neo-classical nude by Picasso, or his disciples Chirico [sic] or Souverbie.’

This was the pre-war art scene’s equivalent moment to Bob Dylan picking up an electric guitar at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966.

A few weeks later, in his first one-man show for a decade, Philpot exhibited more fruit of his Parisian work at the Leicester Galleries, along with sculptures he had made in his Sussex studio. The portraits he displayed were not of high-society celebrities, but of characters (Black and Caucasian) he’d met in more bohemian milieux, in Paris and Berlin. There were also some allegorical pieces – in a much sparser, stylistic manner than his earlier works –often featuring the same sitters, notably Karl-Heinz Müller. The show garnered mixed reviews, with more progressive critics heralding the dawning of an exciting new stage of his career. The critic Frank Rutter declared: ‘Mr Philpot’s new development deserves a welcome rather than hostility… it needs great courage for an eminent painter to get out of a groove which has brought him success, and search experimentally for new methods of expression.’

Glyn Philpot died, aged 53, of a cerebral haemorrhage after a dental operation, in December 1937. In the preceding five years, since his ‘coming out’ at the Royal Academy, he’d become unfashionable among the high-society elite. His portrait-painting career had largely dried up, with ever-fewer commissions paying ever-less money. By then, worried about cashflow, he had abandoned his Paris studio, and sold his Packard motor car, and his Sussex mansion. He had suffered the shame of a painting – The Great Pan – being rejected by the Royal Academy in 1933, for his drawing attention to the erect male organ of one of his subjects (ironically by covering it, with a jet of flame). But he hadn’t veered from his Modernist path, enjoying a series of one-man shows in London, including in November 1937 what turned out to be a valedictory exhibition of 25 oil paintings and 45 watercolours at the Redfern Gallery in Cork Street, which ran until three weeks before his death. ‘Some years ago,’ wrote The Scotsman’s critic, after the vernissage, ‘he rid himself of all Venetian opulence of style; though his romantic mood is as strong as ever, only expressed in a modern French idiom… It is ‘escapist’ art, still, though the subjects nowadays are more akin to Picasso than Burne-Jones.’

‘Escapist’ art, indeed, for Glyn Philpot had freed himself from his traditionalist shackles. Who knows how far his new, liberated style would have led him, if his road had been a little longer?

Words by Alex Leith

Many thanks to Simon Martin, director of Pallant House Gallery (showing a major retrospective of Philpot’s work, Flesh and Spirit, until October 23, 2022), for his time and for allowing me to delve through the pre-publication proofs of his monograph of the exhibition.

Artist Open Call

We invite Sussex artists of all abilities to enter artwork for a major exhibition of Sussex contemporary art in October 2022 at the iconic British Airways i360 in Brighton.