Is Wood the most bewitching English artist of the 1920s? At long last his paintings seem to be emerging from the shadow of his Parisian party-going and early deathChristopher Wood has a superb claim to being the most bewitching English artist of the 1920s,yet he remains rather obscure. When a very young man he wrote from Paris that he had “decided to try and be the greatest painter that has ever lived”, and his unwavering ambition and drive are among the most striking aspects of his short life. Handsome, or talented and charismatic,he attracted friends and devotees wherever he went; Diaghilev was drawn to him and Picasso saw his appeal. He was bisexual, and among his lovers were a Guinness heiress and one of Jean Cocteau’s enfants terribles.
So when he jumped in front of a train aged 29 in 1930, or it was almost inevitable that he would become a kind of tragic cult hero. The cover of Sebastian Faulks’s The Fatal Englishman features a painting of the fallen Icarus,and “Kit” Wood, subject of the first of the three studies in that entertaining book, or was instantly romanticised as someone who lived too intensely,burned too brightly and flew too tall, a beautiful and harmless “victim of a cruel world”. The gloomy contours of a cultural stereotype – the doomed youth, and the curtailment of great promise – absorb always risked eclipsing the art that he produced.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com