Lady Ottoline Morrell: Augustus John painted his friend true to life, formidable and insecure (1919).
‘Sitting astride the bow window ledge, smelling the heliotrope – or was it the sea? – half of Kezia was in the garden and half of her in the room.’
– Katherine Mansfield, in her notes for the essay That Woman, 1916.
In the room behind the staircase at no. 44 Bedford Square, Lady Ottoline Morrell stood trembling with nerves as she ran her fingers over the chimneypiece. In a few hours she would once again welcome some of London’s most exciting artists and writers to her salon. Steeling herself against her own lack of beauty, she took comfort in her patronage, knowing that they must at least pretend to like her.
It was not easy being Lady Ottoline, a fierce patron of the arts toward the end of the belle époque. Later the tidal wave would be dubbed modernism, but in 1905 it felt like a cultural siege. Creative passions ignited tempers and brawls. Conventional thinking was torn apart and scrutinised for its flaws. Nothing was spared, not art, literature, theatre, architecture, music, science, religion, commerce, employment nor morality. Everyone was a revolutionary, and inside the grey stone façade of Bedford Square, art was the battlefield.
The artists who availed themselves of Morrell’s hospitality had considerable fun at her expense, even while immortalising her according to their skills. She had her portrait painted numerous times: 6ft of steely resolve with flamboyant red hair and an imperious manner bred of very good connections.
Years later, the writer Nicolette Devas would recall that when she was young, she peeked at Morrell’s profile through the rhododendrons and thought she was a witch. The great draughtsman Augustus John refused to soften the jutting jaw and prominent nose, choosing to capture the defiant child inside. While some deemed his portrait an affront, Morrell reportedly liked it very much. It may have helped that they were lovers at one time.
Novelist D.H. Lawrence, who accepted many Morrell social invitations, caricatured his hostess so mercilessly in 1916’s Women In Love that the two didn’t speak again for twelve years. When Aldous Huxley did the same in Crome Yellow, she never forgave him. Her protégé Mark Gertler was more kind, sensitive perhaps to his own lifelong role as an outsider.
Lady Ottoline Morrell: Augustus John painted his friend true to life, formidable and insecure (1919).
Morrell’s husband and friends invariably disappointed her – the author Virginia Woolf was one notable exception – and her numerous love affairs with both men and women were short-lived in every case but one. Ultimately, she seemed best at superficial relationships. ‘I want more than he wants’, she wrote in her journal of one male companion, and ‘he holds things back and is never open with me, it’s odd!’
While Morrell’s sexual behaviour made her the subject of gossip within her social circles, she can be forgiven for seeking emotional relief. Her husband Philip Morrell, a Member of Parliament, was a serial philanderer and may have been mentally ill. He expected his wife to take care of the children he fathered with his mistresses – some reports say two babies were born in one year – and cover for his instability.
No wonder, then, that his wife had a habit of breezing into London studios to see what her favourite artists were up to. The studio atmosphere appealed to her: air thick with the smell of paint and turpentine, no stuffy London mores, and no husband. If the sitter caught her eye the girl might get an invitation to Bedford Square. This kind of thing was beginning to happen all over London; it reflected an evolution in the social role of artists’ models.
By 1914 models had become an accepted part of creative society, as The Tatler noted: ‘A rather arresting personality, by the way, who seems to prefer artistic to purely social circles, is the Duke of Portland’s sister, Lady Ottoline Morrell. At her house in Bedford Square … you may be sure of meeting the newest thing in poets, painters, poseurs, and the like …’11
History isn’t quite sure what to do with Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Morrell. She has variously been described as a desperate eccentric, prescient patron of young talent, self-entitled aristocrat, fierce defender of liberal values and a silly woman to be pitied. She was, in fact, all of these things and more. Her vigorous life and the development of modernism in Britain are forever intertwined.
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The new aesthetics percolating in London during the belle époque had their genesis in the prior century. The modern philosophical movement took root in Europe around 1850, when manufacturing processes started changing life in earnest. Everyday people began to question the traditional order of things.
This gave rise to a restlessness that became pervasive in society, politics, philosophy and the creative arts. Realism was losing ground. Post-impressionism received a boost from the American artist James McNeill Whistler, although he wouldn’t live to see London’s first exhibition of modern art. The march of modernism was on, and models had a front-row seat, even as they worried about their employability.
The number of art movements associated with the modernist period has been variously described as ranging from ten to over sixty (subsets of the major movements are difficult to define). Prior to 1900, the Impressionists, Neo-and Post-Impressionists in France and the Pre-Raphaelites in England lit the fuse with the first modern breaks from tradition. The Pre-Raphaelites were particularly introspective, with ties to both the past and the future.
From there, the rapid-fire influences of Art Nouveau, Symbolism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Orphism, Suprematism, Vorticism and Constructivism shook the London art scene. Twisting across this landscape were common strands: the importance of contemplation, authenticity and social and economic progress. One radical idea was that art should come from within, rather than portray something simply observed. Experimentation was rampant in all forms.
Progressive modernism – that is, modernism of the early twentieth century as opposed to the late nineteenth century – brought with it a sense of urgency. Why wait for obsolescence to run its course if you could move on now? And why not harness tradition for your own purpose in the process? Were the old institutions and values even worth preserving? The past wasn’t necessarily to be forgotten, but it could be reshaped into something new, or parodied to make a point.
Fortunately for artists’ models, their role in the volatile early decades of the 1900s stayed relatively constant. For one thing, the London art schools remained rooted in anatomical approaches to figure drawing. This required a ready supply of male and female models for life classes. In addition, while realism was steadily losing its lustre, the process of art still required real-life sitters. The interpretation, though, could be dramatically new.
Pablo Picasso’s 1907 painting Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (The Young Women of Avignon), shows five nude women portrayed as flat, cut-out shapes. They look out of the canvas with expressions that are simultaneously blank and angry, turning the traditional dynamic of the male gaze and the female subject on its head. All five models are drawn from sex workers Picasso saw at a brothel on Carrer d’Avinyó in Barcelona, Spain.
Les Demoiselles D’Avignon: Picasso shattered traditional ideas of artistic expression (1907).
Were the five confrontational models truly that fierce when they posed? Did they stare that aggressively at the strangers who stared back at them? Two of the prostitutes appear to wear exotic masks, reflecting the African influence that so engaged Picasso at the time. Even masked, the faces seem to be in harmony with the whole.
The public was shocked and angered by Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. Picasso was pleased. He said of his painting, ‘I paint forms as I think them, not as I see them.’ With those twelve words, modernism’s most savage disruptor drove the sharp edge of a wedge straight through traditional thinking about art.
This idea of ‘seeing with the mind’ was liberating to Britain’s young artists. Rules were meant to be broken, and they broke them with abandon. For example, it was more important to value love than it was to practice monogamy or pursue a certain gender. By the early 1920s, Garsington Manor, the country estate owned by Philip and Ottoline Morrell, would acquire a reputation as an intelligentsia house of debauchery. Located close to Oxford, Garsington rivalled Augustus John’s Alderney Manor in Dorset for sheer lack of inhibition.
Professional models were largely superfluous at these country residences. Writers, composers, poets and philosophers came and went as the spirit moved them. Couples formed and reformed, finding a new freedom in bisexuality. If a model was needed from outside the group, there was always a gardener or housemaid nearby.
Lady Ottoline’s social weight remained in full force throughout this seminal time in British art. This gave her the ability to further the careers of the artists she patronised. She reigned over the fluid life at Garsington with a carefree instability, engaging in a longstanding affair with the philosopher Bertrand Russell and taking numerous other lovers. These reportedly included the painter Dora Carrington (described by Morrell as a wild moorland pony), the psychiatrist Axel Munthe and the art historian Roger Fry.
Back in London, the elder statesman of the art world, John Singer Sargent, stayed comfortably above the fray at his Tite Street home. There he continued to translate a keen eye for detail into stunning portraits of well-known sitters, employing his own ideas of beauty. Sargent died in 1925 having confidently explored modern techniques in his own way without undue pressure.
Those who criticised Sargent for saying things such as, ‘the painter’s business being, not to pick and choose, but to render the effect before him’ failed to appreciate his modern nuance. The effects he saw before him were opportunities to unveil a sitter’s inner truth through carefully rendered detail. That in itself was a modern sensibility. It was a masterful line to walk between authenticity and commercial appeal.
As his friend and biographer Edward Charteris noted, when Sargent wasn’t committed to a society portrait at his studio,
He paints here, there and everywhere with a deliberate nonchalance in the choice of his topics, taking things as they come; discovering things as it were by accident, but seeing them with an intensely personal outlook, more nearly concerned, in fact, with how he sees and how he paints than with the associations of what he sees.12
Sargent may have crossed paths with Morrell in London, but they were very different personalities with divergent opinions on art. Life at Garsington Manor would not have appealed to him. In 1929, however, a society columnist enthused over the ‘star-scattered grass’ at the Morrells’ country house, saying:
One of the women who have been responsible for keeping the young idea going is Lady Ottoline Morrell, who with her husband, Mr Philip Morrell, has entertained at her lovely house, Garsington Manor, all the young writers and painters who in the last ten or twenty years have become famous.13
The 1930s would mark the end of Morrell’s reign, and her immense influence on the London art scene was only fully appreciated after her death in 1938.
Morrell’s legacy is helped by the fact that she was an avid amateur photographer, and thus hundreds of images exist of Garsington life. Her photographs show a tour de force of artists and writers posing for one of the era’s most significant innovations: the personal camera. It was a fitting intersection of the creative milieu and modern technology, but it was far from the first.
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Photographs and artwork had been exhibited together as early as 1859 at the Universal Exposition in Paris, when photography was just twenty years old. This spurred a new appreciation for the camera that accelerated with Alfred Stieglitz’s modernist images in the late 1800s. Suddenly the photograph was no longer just a tool; it was a legitimate creative medium. Cameras would become a darling of the avant-garde.
Some artists dismissed the use of photography in those early years, some welcomed it and some embraced it in secret. The French editor and critic Ernest Lacan described the relationship of photography to painters as being ‘like a mistress whom one cherishes and hides, about whom one speaks with joy but does not want others to mention.’14
Photography was a cautious love affair for artists’ models as well. Posing for the camera paid more per hour than posing in a classroom or studio – the rate could be two or three times that of a life sitting. However, a photo required just one sitting, whereas a session at the Slade typically lasted for a week or more. Taken on balance, the lure of photography for models was less about the money and more about the chance to emerge from anonymity.
This push-pull of change was a hallmark of the progressively modern 1900s in England. It was a liberating and exuberant time for many, but it could also lead to crippling self-doubt. Lesser-known artists who held fast to realism struggled to sell their paintings. Some found personal introspection unbearably hard and retreated to dark places. Others felt that they had wasted their lives perfecting techniques that were hopelessly out of fashion.
In 1922, the neoclassic painter John William Godward left his studio door unlocked, wrote a suicide note, and closed himself in a lavatory with the gas on. Years later, one of the Slade’s most brilliant young talents, Mark Gertler, would also take his life by gas.
Gertler, who once wrote that poverty ‘had a beautiful simplicity, which was to be envied’, had struggled for decades to feel he belonged. By 1939 four of his close friends were dead: Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence, Dora Carrington and Ottoline Morrell – the last from an experimental cancer treatment. He was separated from his wife and war loomed again. The heady rush of modernism that had sustained him as a young man was gone. For Gertler, it was an unbearable time in which to be alive.