Describing Dora Carrington as 'Beyond Bloomsbury' is a double edged sword. Undoubtedly it is sound marketing to attach a familiar name to a relatively unknown artist, but the cosy Charleston clique are a very marmite bunch. Even the clever suggestion that Carrington is 'more than' Bell, Grant and co might well be enough to put some people off. More importantly, the association is tenuous, focusing more on biography than art, and it highlights the big problem in dealing with Carrington - her complicated, tragic life gets in the way. The best thing to do - and the best thing the curators at Pallant House could have done - is to ignore the personalities and concentrate on the paintings. Unfortunately, they try but don't succeed.
Another barrier to understanding Carrington: her art was varied and variable. Dotted throughout the exhibition are loosely painted, washed-out works which could indeed fit into that Bloomsbury aesthetic. The watercolour of Spanish Soldiers at a Stream with its flattened background pattern of verticals and arcs and elongated figures reduced to khaki-ed anonymity is an extreme example of this. Her characterful portrait of the cedar tree at Tidmarsh, although it bridges the gap to her more recognisable strong-coloured chunkiness, has the same scrappy linearity. Then we get Carrington the craftsman, obsessively decorating her homes and the objects in them, and making a bit of money on the side with 'tinseled pictures' using textured tin foil on glass. The evidence here is sketchy - old photographs and a few surviving pieces. The style seems almost fin-de-siècle fairy-tale in its sugary colours and curving, dapple-brushed figures. Her often reproduced Iris Tree on a Horse is one of the few occasions in which she transferred this decorative style into an oil painting.
So far so Bloomsbury, perhaps, but if you want to get to the heart of Carrington's art you need to start at the beginning, with the Slade. It is represented here by skillfully rendered nudes, for which she won prizes (an exhibition of UCL's collection of Slade student work is one I would really like to see). Carrington was one of a prodigious group of students: a photo from around 1912 shows her alongside Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, Christopher Nevinson; other contemporaries included David Bomberg and Paul Nash. Leaving aside the fraught, possibly abusive relationship Carrington had with Gertler, these are the artists who most closely share her aesthetic vision. Most of them, at some point, exploited a pseudo-naive style which, rather in the way New Objectivity did in Germany, could show the world in all its oddness by appearing to simply show reality. Carrington's two great landscapes in show here, The Farm at Watendlath and Spanish Landscape with Mountains, exemplify this. Watendlath has a brooding creepiness, as otherworldly as a Tolkien illustration it foregoes tweeness in favour of proto-Surrealist unease. Meanwhile, the Spanish countryside is evoked in bodily forms reminiscent of Ithell Colquhoun.
It is, however, in portraiture that Carrington really shines. From the Van Gogh-like salt of the earth solidity of Mrs Box to the crumpled pastiness of EM Forster, she approaches her sitters with utter conviction and confidence. She treats pots of flowers with the same solemnity. Tellingly, when she paints herself, she resorts to style over substance, retreating behind cap, pantaloons and strong outlined colour-blocks which remind one of Mary Cassatt's prints. She twists, already in the process of departing, as if wary of giving up too much of herself. The filmed cavorting, the long-fringed 'crop-head', the lack of signed works and reluctance to exhibit: this was a woman who didn't want to be exposed. It is this self-portrait, above all, which makes me reluctant to jump on the biographical band waggon. Her life is there in her painting - Lytton Strachey, Gerald Brenan, Mark Gertler, Ralph Partridge, Tidmarsh. Would she really have wanted us to flesh it out any more, to analyse and agonise, to empathise and pity?
Pallant House do a great job of promoting British twentieth century art and they have a solid track record in promoting lesser known, especially women, artists. Dora Carrington deserves the recognition and this show succeeds best when it lets her art speak for her. It is ultimately frustrating that the curators can't quite resist bringing in the two 'B's. Ignore biography, in my view Dora Carrington is far, far beyond Bloomsbury.
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