Mark
Gertler, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland,
was born in Spitalfields, London on 9th
December, 1891. Educated at a local board school, he decided to become
an artist after seeing the work of W. P. Frith.
With the financial support of the Jewish Educational Aid Society,
Gertler studied at the Slade School where
he met fellow students, David Bomberg,
Paul Nash, Stanley
Spencer, Dora Carrington and Charles
Nevinson. Gertler was considered the best draughtsman to study
at the Slade since Augustus John.
Several important collectors became aware of his work and those who
purchased his early paintings include Edward Marsh, private secretary
to Winston Churchill and Ottoline
Morrell. Marsh was so impressed with Gertler's work that he paid
him £10 a month in return for first refusal on his paintings.
Gertler was a pacifist and refused to support Britain's involvement
in the First World War. When he contributed
The Creation of Eve, to an art exhibition in 1915, Claude Phillips
in the Daily Telegraph described
it as an example of "Hunnish indecency" and another said
it was "made in Germany".
After the Battle of the Somme Gertler painted
Merry-Go-round (1916).
Considered by many art critics as the most important British painting
of the First World War, Merry-go-round,
shows a group of military and civilian figures caught on the vicious
circle of the roundabout. One gallery refused to show the painting
because Gertler was a conscientious objector.
Eventually it appeared in the Mansard Gallery
in May, 1917.
The first symptoms of tuberculosis
appeared in April 1920. While in Banchory Sanatorium
near Aberdeen, he painted Trees
at Sanatorium. Although in poor health, Gertler continued
to have yearly exhibitions at the Goupil Gallery.
In 1925 he was admitted to Maundesley Sanatorium
in Norfolk. He was forced to return in 1929 and became depressed by
the loss of two close friends, Katherine
Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence, from
the disease. Gertler had difficulty selling his work in the 1930s
and although he had a few loyal supporters such as J.
B. Priestley and Aldous Huxley, he was
forced to teach part-time at Westminster Technical
College.
Edward Marsh also continued to buy Gertler's paintings even though
he admitted he no longer liked or understood his paintings. Gertler
replied: "The rouble is that I never set out to paint to please.
My greatest spiritual pleasure in life is to paint just as I feel
impelled to do at the time."
Depressed by his ill-health and the the failure to sell more paintings,
Gertler committed suicide on 23rd June, 1939. Mark Gertler is buried
in Willesden Jewish Cemetery.
Mark Gertler, Merry-go-round (1916)
(1)
Mark Gertler, letter to Dora
Carrington (December, 1912)
Yes, my isolation is extraordinary. I am alone, alone in the whole
of this world! Yes, if only like my brothers I was an ordinary workman
as I should have been. But no! I must desire, desire. How I pay for
those desires! Oh! God! Do I deserve to be so tormented? By my own
ambitions I am cut off from my own family and class and by them I
have been
raised to be equal to a class I hate! They do not understand me nor
I them. So I am an outcast. As I look at my desk I laugh, for there
are dozens of notices of me in the daily papers, a lot of them praising
my talents. Oh! yes I am quite well known, and yet alone.
(2) D.
H. Lawrence, wrote to Mark Gertler about seeing Merry-go-round
(9th October, 1916)
I have just seen your terrible and dreadful picture Merry-go-round
This is the first picture you have painted: it is the best modern
picture I have seen: I think it is great and true. But it is horrible
and terrifying. If they tell you it is obscene, they will say truly.
You have made a real and ultimate revelation. I think this picture
is your arrival.
(3) Mark
Gertler wrote about painting Merry-go-round on October, 1916.
I live in a constant state of over-excitement, so much do my work
and conception thrill me. It is almost too much for me and I am always
feeling rather ill. Sometimes after a day's work I can hardly walk.
(4) Roger
Fry, letter to Vanessa Bell on the work of Mark Gertler (6th October,
1917)
What he has
to express is not, it must be confessed, of the highest quality,
because his reactions are limited and rather undistinguished. He has
only two or three notes, and they are neither rich nor rare. For an
artist he is unimaginative, and often in their blank simplicity his
conceptions are all but commonplace. Though a first-rate craftsman
who paints admirably,
he lacks sensibility.
(5)
Mark Gertler, letter to Dora
Carrington (20th February, 1918)
I am a complex being; there are many bad sides to my nature; but my
real flame always burns brightly, and no wind or hurricane, ever can
extinguish it.
(6)
Virginia
Woolf, diary entry describing Mark
Gertler (10th September, 1918)
His face is a little tight and pinched; but the word he would wish
one to use of him is powerful. His mind certainly has a powerful spring
to it. He is also evidendy an immense egoist. He means by sheer willpower
to conquer art. But bating this sort of aggression he was well worth
talking to. Leonard noticed his amazing quickness. He would soon have
told us the story of his life. I felt about him, as about some women,
that unnatural repressions have forced him into unnatural assertions.
(7)
Mark
Gertler, letter to Dorothy
Brett (November, 1918)
It is not the fear of starving
or anything as simple as that, that haunts me.
It is the general principle. I long to be free and independent for
my living, both from people and my work. To have to think of selling
pictures, all the
time and to tolerate silly people coming up here to see them, is awful.
It creeps into all one's moods and spoils everything.
(8)
Mark
Gertler, letter to Ottoline
Morrell (7th May, 1924)
I believe my age to be a
critical one -I feel from now to forty to be, as it were, my last
chance - the last chance to
justify my existence - to really learn how to live and to achieve
something. If I don't do it by the next 10 years I am done for.
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