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Thursday 4 December 2008

Honest observer

Laura Knight at the Theatre
Lowry Galleries, until 6 July

For a show-off who loved the limelight, literally and metaphorically, Knight’s vision of the theatre is actually rather complex. Her paintings are backstagey rather than stagey, constantly pulling the dressing-room rug from under the illusion to remind the audience how the trick is done. In ‘No 1 Dressing Room’ (1927–47), a lithe young dancer, stripped to the waist, twists around to pin up her golden hair while a black-clothed dresser behind her mends her tutu. As its title shows, the picture’s subject is not the star but the dressing-room, where Knight found ‘everything was glorious to paint’. As a no-nonsense northern artist who made no distinction between painting Carmo’s Circus and the Nuremberg Trials, she identified with the cockney dressers’ classless attitude: ‘Panto — opera — ballet — just another crowd to hook up and peel.’ Dancers, dressers, circus artistes, gypsy fortune-tellers, wartime factory-workers: Knight liked painting other hardworking women. In ‘The Little Ballet Dancer’ (1921) we glimpse her easel reflected in Lopokova’s dressing-room mirror. It’s a comment on art and illusion: this looks like magic, the picture says, but it’s work.

The magic sometimes fails. Knight’s oil colours can be garish — they do no favours to Picasso’s costume designs for the Cuadro Flamenco — but her drawings and prints are sensitive and subtle. One discovery is the hand-coloured etching ‘Putting on Tights’ (1926), showing a nude dancer bending over in a daring pose strikingly similar to Sickert’s ‘Woman Washing her Hair’ of 20 years earlier, but better observed. Diaghilev’s old ballet master Cecchetti had such faith in Knight’s command of anatomy that he used her sketches to critique his dancers’ technique. The pastel drawing ‘Ballerina Getting Dressed’ (1924) is another vivid study of a working dancer, neck muscles straining and legs sturdily braced as she leans forward, chin on chest, to tie her culottes. Degas would have veered between pathos and voyeurism; Knight views her subject as a fellow-trouper.

Knight’s passion for painting on the spot, trying ‘to make the first touch the final touch throughout the whole work’, gives her images a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-down-to-it quality refreshingly different from the precious picture-making of the Camden Town Group. It can also make her heavy-handed. A critic in Apollo in 1930 regretted her single-minded obsession with ‘the Truth, the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth’ when ‘every artist should know it is his or her duty to be a splendid liar’. But the splendid lies that dazzle contemporaries don’t always work on future generations, whereas good honest observation never dates.

More articles from: Laura Gascoigne | this section

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