Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury (Exhibition at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester: November 2024-April 2025)
Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury by Anne Chisholm and Ariane Banks, Pallant House Gallery, 2025 (exhibition catalogue)
Pallant House Gallery have earned a reputation over the years for holding very successful exhibitions of lesser-known artists. With the Dora Carrington show they have once again excelled themselves, gathering together many of her finest works to show them as a group for the very first time. Although often associated with the Bloomsbury group, Carrington was always on the periphery of that particular association and her work shows few of the characteristics usually found in their own efforts. So this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue provide a golden opportunity to fully appreciate the work of an artist whose somewhat erratic output was undervalued in the past.
Dora Carrington was born in Hereford in 1893. Ten years later the family move to Bedford, and Carrington attended Bedford Grammar School for Girls. In 1910, at the age of just seventeen, she was accepted into the Slade School of Fine Art, joining a group of young artists who would go on to dominate the English art scene in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond. This would mark perhaps the most significant change in her life. As soon as she had settled at the school she cropped her hair and dropped her Christian name in favour of the simple ‘Carrington.’ She became immediately fascinating to a number of her fellow students: Paul Nash, Nevinson, Gertler, and (briefly) Bomberg all professed their love for her, but it was Gertler with whom she formed the closest relationship, one that would last until 1918.
It is something of a disappointment that Pallant House were unable to borrow Gertler’s magnificent picture of Carrington (Portrait of a Girl Wearing a Blue Jersey), painted in 1912 shortly after they met. Instead, they featured an enlarged photographic reproduction in the main entrance which, by comparison with the original, is oddly unappealing. At this point in his career Gertler was influenced by the early Florentine Renaissance paintings that he had seen at the National Gallery, and he designed the portrait in that style. Carrington looks directly at us with a half-smile. She seems confident, almost statuesque, set against a shimmering blue Renaissance sky. Around the same time Carrington produced a fine, delicate drawing of Gertler, capturing the artist in a thoughtful mood. It is drawn in the established Slade style with heavy shading around the neck, but the face clearly demonstrates Carrington’s mastery of this particular medium. Carrington excelled in this most difficult of tasks, not only creating a true likeness but also imbuing the completed image with emotion and a dramatic stillness. It is a genuine masterpiece.
Carrington’s relationship with Gertler was fraught with difficulty, and their surviving letters reveal just how complex it was. Carrington was reluctant to commit herself sexually to Gertler, and he found this increasingly hard to accept. She consistently told him how much she loved him but that she was repelled by the idea of sleeping with him. He even proposed marriage at one time, promising "to help you in your art career” and “absolute freedom and a nice studio of your own.” Eventually they did consummate their relationship, but both found the experience unsatisfactory —and when Carrington met Lytton Strachey, their relationship was doomed. Carrington first encountered Strachey in late 1915 at Asheham House, a weekend retreat of Virginia and Leonard Woolf. The group who had gathered there for a three-day break also included Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Whilst they were out on a walk together, Strachey suddenly grabbed hold of Carrington and kissed her. She was shocked and appalled, and complained to a fellow guest, Barbara Hiles, who sought to pacify her by explaining that Strachey was homosexual and therefore harmless. This antagonised Carrington even more, and she plotted her revenge: later that night she crept into his room with a pair of scissors, determined to cut off his beard. As she was about to commit the act he woke up and they looked at one another. According to her biographer Gretchen Gerzina, “From that moment, until the end of her, she was absolutely in love with him.”
The following year she painted a famous portrait of him which must surely count as one of her finest works. The author is depicted sitting in a chair reading, his long fingers seemingly embracing the book. He is concentrating on the task in hand, the book held close to his eyes. Despite the ordinary nature of the pose the picture exudes a curious power, no doubt deriving from the artist’s affection for her subject. In a diary entry dated January 1st 1917 she wrote, “I sit here, almost every night it seems sometimes, looking at your picture, now tonight it looks wonderfully good...I should like to go on always painting you every week.”
It is a strange fact that within art-historical academia the lives of female artists, such as Artemisia Gentileschi, are picked over far more meticulously for clues to the meanings of artistic works than are the biographies of their male counterparts. In Carrington’s case, it is difficult to find such subjective significance via her experiences: with the exception of the Strachey portrait, in which her love is obvious, there is little --especially in the landscapes-- that points to any particular event in her life. However, what is clear from these paintings is her affinity with the natural world.
In 1920 she painted The Cedar Tree at Tidmarsh. Tidmarsh Mill House had been the home of Carrington and Strachey for some time and she had worked incredibly hard to make it comfortable for them both. The house itself is discernible in the background and the cedar tree takes up most of the painting, with a farm cart and ladder under it. While in many ways unremarkable, the painting represents a significant step forward for Carrington. For the first time she has taken control of the scene that she wishes to record, committing herself to doing it in her own way. The tree itself and its relationship with the human world around it is the subject. The house is hardly visible behind the leaf-laden tree, and the farm equipment rests where it was left, within the tree's embrace. This is one of the first examples of Carrington painting a scene that she herself found beautiful, despite its everyday location; she has captured the beauty of the ordinary in a unique, almost spiritual manner. Carrington and Strachey lived together until his death in 1932. They enjoyed each other's company while remaining free to form romantic attachments with both men and women. In this unusual domestic set-up Carrington found contentment and was able to pursue her own artistic path. Like Gertler, she rejected the then-contemporaneous move towards abstraction, and instead painted portraits and landscapes in a very English style reminiscent of visionary artists like Blake or Samuel Palmer. It is a tribute to the curators of the exhibition that they have succeeded in borrowing almost all of the finest paintings that Carrington created in the latter period of her life.
One such late work, Downs from Ham Spray in Winter (1929-1930), can stand alongside any other great landscape painting. Two lone trees loom within a snow-covered scene, with two clumps of trees on either side in the distance. The stillness is so palpable that you can almost feel the cold air. Spend a few minutes looking at this painting, and you quickly discern its timeless quality: Carrington has given us a glimpse of somewhere that might not have changed much in a thousand years. The scene seems to transcend human activity. Nature is in control, and in its beauty reveals itself to be almost indestructible. This is a work of consummate skill and sensitivity. Carrington’s artistic reputation has been been very slow to gain momentum, partly as a result of her own refusal to exhibit her work. Much of her output, especially towards the end of her life, was concerned with family and friends. For example, late in 1931 she painted a trompe-l’oeil window for Diana Mitford at her home, Biddesden House in Wiltshire. Inside the painted window-frame a housemaid dressed in eighteenth-century costume, complete with mob cap, looks out at us as she peels an apple. On the other side of her a handsome cat gazes up longingly at a bird in a cage. Diana had recently given birth to a son, and the bird's entrapment may be a subtle reference to her domestic situation, enclosed by marriage and motherhood.
Strachey and Carrington led a complicated social life but remained devoted to each other, in spite of their several entanglements with other people. Carrington's letters to Strachey are clear evidence of her love for him, as are her portraits of his immediate family. She became very close to his sister Julia Strachey and painted her in 1928. Julia stares out of the picture with a somewhat steely look in her eyes, which seem to follow you. She wears a pale headdress that blends in with the shaded background. Like so many of Carrington's paintings, this is again a study of stillness and calm. The outside world is far away: this is simply the image of a beautiful woman at peace with herself and her surroundings. There are no artefacts or objects to distract us, with the exception of a double row of pearls hung gently around Julia's neck, entirely in keeping with the assured pose. This is a woman exuding self-possession, superbly captured by the artist.
Just two days after Carrington died Julia wrote an emotional tribute to her, which was later published as "Carrington – A Study of a Modern Witch." In it she pays tribute to Carrington as a young woman of her time, yet not quite comfortable with it. Her first sentence is worth quoting in full, as it not only sets the tone for the whole piece but also seems to reveal much that remains true of this special artist. Julia wrote that:
“Carrington was by nature a lover of marvels, a searcher for the emotionally magnificent life; at heart and by vocation she was an impresario, collecting people and their climates, arranging for their exhibition; going to endless trouble in assembling the right properties and accompaniments so that they might display their magic and their microcosm to the best advantage in some great auditorium out of sight.”
The final few years of Carrington’s life were not particularly happy. Late in 1929 she found that she had become pregnant by Bernard 'Beakus' Penrose, and her husband Ralph Partridge paid for an abortion. Strachey was increasingly absent, and her affair with Penrose was unsatisfactory. Indeed, in the final year of her life she painted little, her trompe-l’oeil for Diana Mitford being her final piece. In November 1931 Strachey became ill, and in the following months Carrington nursed him at their home, Ham Spray.
Strachey’s illness was hard to diagnose. At first it was thought to be typhoid, then ulcerative colitis. Neither was accurate. Strachey died in the early hours of January 21st, 1932, and an autopsy revealed that he had suffered from a virulent cancer of the stomach. Within a few hours of his death Carrington made her first attempt at suicide. Shutting herself in the garage, she started the car engine and lay on the back seat wrapped in a blanket, and so positioned she fell asleep. Later that night she awoke in her bed with a doctor and Ralph Partridge --who had rescued her-- at her side. Despite the efforts of her close friends to save her from despair, on the 11th of March she shot herself. She was just thirty-eight.
The catalogue is a worthwhile accompaniment to the exhibition. The well-written essays cover most aspects of Carrington’s life and work, and the full text of Julia Strachey’s extraordinary letter is a welcome bonus. The catalogue is illustrated with most of the finest works from the show. In the final essay, "Becoming Carrington," Jane Hill --the author of The Art of Dora Carrington-- provides an excellent overview of her life and career, concisely exploring how Carrington’s art slowly developed over her career. Without doubt, her reluctance to exhibit her work inhibited her acceptance within the contemporary art scene, but as Hill is keen to point out, it was the people and places around her that inspired her, rather than her standing with the art establishment. Taken together, this exhibition and the catalogue which supports it mark an important moment in the ongoing campaign to reposition Carrington as a leading English artist of the period between the wars. That she painted from her heart is now beyond question, and that she produced works that evoke an emotional response from many who view them is also indisputable. However, it is arguable that she failed to achieve all that she could have done with her considerable ability. In many ways her personal life overtook her, and in the end her art was not enough. She left a powerful body of work that reminds us of the need for artists to paint what they feel, and touch us in that way unique to visual art – a language-free expression of our deepest sentiments and emotions.--Paul Flux
