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Saturday 11 October 2008

Honest observer

Laura Knight at the Theatre
Lowry Galleries, until 6 July

Ascot racegoers whose binoculars wandered from the track in 1936 might have spotted something unusual in the car park: a Rolls-Royce with its back door open and an artist working at an easel inside. Odder still, the artist was a woman — Laura Knight — and unlike her friend Munnings she wasn’t painting the horses. Her subjects were the gypsy fortune-tellers who worked the race crowds as alternative tipsters.

In 1936 Dame Laura Knight (1877–1970) was a household name, newly elected as the only woman member of the Royal Academy seven years after being created DBE. Having made her name as a painter of Newlyn beach scenes, Knight had won national popularity with her pictures of the circus and ballet. Unlike Degas, she wasn’t content with anonymous danseuses. From 1919 she obtained permission to work backstage at Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, gaining intimate access to the dressing-rooms of prima ballerinas Lopokova and Pavlova, and catching the stars off guard and en déshabille.

These famous names of the ballet are now history, and so was Knight’s until The Lowry arts centre in Salford — where the Kirov performs next month — decided to accompany its ballet season with the exhibition Laura Knight at the Theatre. Not much has been seen of Knight since her RA retrospective of 1965, when critics dismissed her work as ‘vulgar’. But since that word has now almost lost its meaning, it may be time for a reassessment.

The 80 works in this show span three decades from the early 1920s, when Knight was in her 50s, to the early 1950s, when she was over 80. The early rooms focus on Russian dance stars glimpsed from the wings or in their dressing-rooms: Lopokova flying as if on wires in ‘Les Sylphides’ (c.1920) and returning to earth to adjust ‘The Ballet Shoe’ (c.1932); Pavlova presenting her haughty profile for a black crayon drawing (c.1920) or posing as a statuesque ‘Grecian Dancer’ — with surprisingly stout legs — for a suite of etchings. Later rooms feature on-the-spot theatre sketches done backstage at Birmingham Repertory productions (Knight once captured the 20-year-old Gielgud as Romeo smoking while cleaning his nails with an orange stick). She was always avid for new artistic experiences. ‘It is ridiculous,’ she admitted in her bestselling 1936 autobiography Oil Paint and Grease Paint, ‘one person cannot paint everything and work in all mediums’. But she tried.

More articles from: Laura Gascoigne | this section

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