Walter Sickert : Peindre Et Transgresser

Exhibition at the Petit Palais, Paris, 14 October 2022 - 29 January 2023

A resolutely modern artist, with enigmatic and often destabilising subjects, the English painter Walter Sickert (1860-1942) is little known in French collections. Yet he forged artistic and friendly links with many French artists and imported to England a way of painting that was strongly influenced by his Parisian sojourns.

Very provocative, in the context of a relatively strict English academic art, Walter Sickert painted subjects that were considered too daring at the time, such as music hall scenes or, later, de-eroticised nudes. His virtuoso and strange colour choices, inherited from his apprenticeship with Whistler, as well as his puzzling framing, struck his contemporaries. After a seven-year stay in France, during which he became close to Degas, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Bonnard, Monet and Camille Pissarro, he began his series of 'modern conversation pieces', which turned the classic and traditional genre scenes of English painting into ambiguous, menacing and even sordid pictures, the most famous example being the 'Camden Town Murders' series.

This exhibition catalogue of the first retrospective devoted to Sickert in France allows us to discover the life and work of this singular artist who had a decisive impact on English figurative painting. Essays discuss his love of the theatre and the music hall, his relationship with France and the influence he had on his contemporaries and on subsequent generations of British artists, including Lucian Freud.