Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Nudes (Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery)
from Paul Holberton Publishing
This is the first publication devoted to Walter Sickert's remarkable group of paintings of female nudes produced in and around Camden Town between 1905 and 1912 and now considered to be among his most important and provocative works. Sickert challenged conventional idealized treatments of the nude by setting his female models in the murky interiors of cheap lodging houses, laid out on iron bedsteads, and painted with an uncompromising realism. His shabby interiors were unmistakable to contemporary viewers as the dark realms of London's poorest working classes and his nudes played unflinchingly to middle class fears of such "dens of iniquity," known as the notorious haunts of prostitutes, slum landlords, and petty criminals. But Sickert also stimulated middle-class fascinaton with such subjects, his keyhole vantage points implicating the viewer as a voyeuristic spectator. These concerns reached their most profound expression in his so-called "Camden Town Murder" paintings in which a clothed male figure is featured in the scene alongside the nude female.
None of the authors accepts the arguments of Patricia Cornwell in Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed (2002) that Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper; this is a more considered approach to the same material.
Walter Sickert: Camden Town Nudes examines in detail more than fifteen of his most important canvases together with related drawings in order to chart his development of the subject during the period.
Sickert: Paintings and Drawings (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in Britis)
by Wendy Baron
from Yale University Press
With his roots in the Victorian era, Sickert broke all taboos. He was uncompromisingly truthful, revealing beauty in the squalid as in the sublime: in cockney music halls, the crumbling streets of Dieppe, the grand sites of Venice, and the low-life of Camden Town. Decades before Warhol, he exploited the potential of photo-based imagery and of studio production lines to create iconic portraits of the grandees of theatrical, social, and political life.
This catalogue is divided into two parts: essay chapters describe Sickert's chronology in terms of stylistic and technical development, and a fully illustrated catalogue presents more than 2800 drawings and paintings, many of which have never been published before.
Walter Sickert: The Complete Writings on Art
by Walter Sickert
from Oxford University Press, USA
Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) was a major European artist and critic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, whose statements on art from the 1880s to the 1930s have been used by artists and writers for more than half a century. Containing over 400 entries, this collection offers new insight into Sickert as an artist and provides valuable information about other British artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Walter Sickert: A Life
by Matthew Sturgis
from HarperCollins UK
Walter Sickert;: A conversation
Our own Sickerts: An exhibition of drawings, paintings and etchings from the collection of Islington Libraries
Mr. Walter Sickert b. 1860 and his printmaker friends and pupils
Walter Sickert: Prints.
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