What was Modern? (1910-1914)

Walter Sickert

Walter Sickert, A Pail of Slops (NA 9.11, July 13, 1911)

WALTER SICKERT contributed regularly to The New Age between 1910 and 1914. The first two series of drawings that The New Age included during this period were comprised solely of his work. Scenes from private life in modern London are Sickert’s subject matter here – domestic labor, intimate conversations between men and women, and the interior of the bedroom. But he presents the city’s more public face as well – particularly in the architectural details of the music hall, a site of popular entertainment that was among the artist’s favorite subjects. Sickert emphasized in his critical writings that line, rather than color, was the essential element in representing the “real.” The rapidity with which a sketch could be completed allowed drawing to work as a “dynamometer” capturing the fleeting and momentary sensation of everyday experience as filtered through the artist’s sensorium. In Sickert’s version of the modern, the sketch works almost like a photograph, arresting its subjects mid-gesture, and infusing what his critics considered banal or even debased subject matter with the lasting permanence of art.