Mark Gertler (1891 – 1939)
If Mark Gertler had spent less time womanising, he might have been a better artist, as Sarah MacDougall's biography shows
The British painter Mark Gertler is most famous for The Merry-go-round, a work that was never sold in his lifetime. Six feet high and four feet wide, it shows a fairground carousel that has been frozen mid-spin, the mouths of its uniformed riders clamped open in a scream.
The painting was completed in 1916, after the Government introduced conscription for men aged between 18 and 41. Thanks to his Austrian parentage, Gertler, who was 25, could not serve and was thus free to satirise the militarism of the age, but the result, as his biographer suggests, tells us almost as much about the artist's private life as it does about his pacifism. Gertler's relationships, just like those of his friends in the Bloomsbury group, went round and round... and round.
Naturally, this was the fault of the woman he adored above all others: his mother, Golda. Gertler was born in 1891 in a London slum in Spitalfields, the fifth child of Jewish immigrants from Galicia. His father, Louis, was a furrier and his sons were expected to pick up apprenticeships in similar fields when they left school. Mark, however, inspired by the colours of an advertisement for beef extract, had other ideas: he wanted to paint. As a boy, his greatest pleasure was to draw in the dim gaslight of his mother's kitchen, a place in which he continued to work long after he had his own studio. At 14, he got a place at the Regent Street Polytechnic; two years later, he started at the Slade.
Gertler, the first working-class Jewish student of his generation to attend the school, was painfully aware of his ordinary background. Even so, thanks to his talent and good looks (with his dark curls and dimpled chin, Gertler was a real dish), he did not exactly struggle to make his mark in this new world. He was soon referring to his 'nice friends among the Upper Class... so much nicer than the rough "East Ends".' His new pals included the painter Christopher Nevinson and it was he who, in 1912, introduced Gertler to a second-year student known only as 'Carrington', the inscrutable creature who was to dominate the next decade of Gertler's life.
For Gertler, Dora Carrington's chief attraction did not lie in the fact that she, too, was a painter - thanks to Golda, he was more in search of a wife than a partner - but in her beguiling good looks. Her china-blue eyes, he said, looked out from a complexion as delicate as a 'white-heart cherry' and her face, he told Augustus John, was like 'a beautiful flower encased in gold'. Her breathy way of speaking - a whispery pant - only added to her allure. For Carrington, however, their mutual fascination was emphatically spiritual rather than sexual and in the coming years she led him a merry dance, always keeping him on a string but sleeping with him only in the last resort.
Meanwhile, Gertler struggled to do work of which he felt truly proud, a situation that changed only after Roger Fry's second post-impressionist exhibition in 1912. The show's impact on him was immediate, shooting vivid colours into his subdued palette. The new pieces, exhibited at the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea, sold 'like hot buns', though this did not ease Gertler's perilous finances. In need of rich patrons, he was introduced to Lady Ottoline Morrell, purveyor of artistic salons to the upper classes. She thought him 'passionate and ambitious and sensitive'. Thereafter, her manor house at Garsington became his second home.
But there was trouble on the horizon in the form of another of her friends, Lytton Strachey. Why Carrington fell for Strachey has always been a mystery to me and, sadly, Sarah MacDougall is unable to shed more light on the affair. Although, in 1916, Carrington finally consummated her relationship with gorgeous Gertler (she did not enjoy the experience), she had eyes only for a pasty, short-sighted, bearded homosexual whose chief talent, at that time, seemed to be sitting in a deckchair. She planned to live with Strachey, a move that drove Gertler quietly insane and by 1918 their affair was over. When, in 1921, Carrington married Ralph Partridge (on whom Strachey, you will recall, had a crush), Gertler was delighted: better him than the hairy crane.
Post-Carrington, Gertler saw plenty of action, even though he was fighting depression and TB. He carried on with a married artist, Valentine Dobree, and may have seduced Ottoline's daughter, Julian. Then, in 1926, he met a painter called Marjorie Greatorex Hodgkinson. The pair married, though only after she fell pregnant (a circumstance that Gertler, in a particularly charming letter to his future wife, described as 'decidedly sordid'). Their son, Luke, was premature and often in hospital, which left them miserable and broke. When Marjorie fell pregnant again, she had an abortion. Gertler was relieved. 'She looks radiant!' he told a friend, afterwards.
The couple separated and Gertler's depression worsened. He was terribly alone - in 1932, his beloved mother had died and, after Strachey's death from cancer, Carrington had shot herself; six years later, Ottoline gave up the ghost. He was also worried about money (the outbreak of war would put an end to his teaching job at the Westminster School of Art). His final show, though admired by Duncan Grant, was not a commercial success. In 1939, Gertler dragged a mattress into his studio at the bottom of the garden, stuffed it against the door, closed the windows, turned on the gas and lay down to die. He left no note.
The Merry-go-round now hangs in Tate Modern, though, alas, this does not mean Gertler is anything more than a minor figure in twentieth-century art; his reputation today has more to do with the cloying circles in which he moved than his rosy nudes. But then, even in his own lifetime, his friends scoffed at his ego: he was lampooned by everyone from Lawrence to Huxley.
Try as she might, his biographer cannot render him a likable fellow. In 1918, after he stayed with the Woolfs, Virginia told her diary that they'd talked 'about Gertler to Gertler for some 30 hours. It is like putting a microscope to your eye. One molehill is wonderfully clear; the surrounding world ceases to exist'.
I'm afraid I cannot improve on this waspish analysis. Only those truly in thrall to bitchy Bloomsbury will want to wade through this workmanlike volume.
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