Wilde

How is it that the work of Gerald Wilde has not yet become synonymous with the best of twentieth-century British painting? Why do many of us not instantly recognise his major works as we do those of Bacon or Auerbach? For in practically every discussion of his work, by artist or critic, whether contemporaneously or posthumously, the word 'genius' is employed again and again to describe his gift for painting and lithography.

Looking back at his early life he seemed to have all the right ingredients for success. Born in London in 1905 and believed (wrongly) to be the son of Oscar Wilde - he was then by some curious coincidence put through art school by Lord and Lady Douglas - Oscar's very own Bosie! He lost one eye in a childhood accident and went to on to study at Chelsea Art College, to be taught by Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore, who became life-long friends and advocates.

In 1941 he participated in the Cotton Board's exhibition Designs for Textiles by Twelve Fine Artists. Zika Ascher commissioned him in 1946 alongside Matisse, Derain, Sutherland, Piper and others to produce Ascher's extraordinary fashion fabrics. One of his designs, printed on silk, was worn by Her Majesty the Queen when she was Princess Elizabeth on the Royal Tour in 1947.

His first solo exhibition in 1948 was held at the Hanover, London's then most discerning gallery. The Institute of Contemporary Art held a major retrospective of his work in 1955. A man at the height of his powers, admired and championed by the likes of David Sylvester, Kenneth Clark and David Kenworthy (Lord Strabolgi), he seemed destined to become one of the leading painters in twentieth-century Britain.

And yet today if it had not been for the work of the art historian Timothy Hilton and the prolonged efforts of London's October Gallery many of us would have missed the work of this profoundly powerful painter.

Partly the answer to his relative obscurity is due to his drinking and behaviour. He was a member of the hard-drinking post-war Soho coterie and was originally believed to have been the inspiration for Joyce Cary's semi-deranged artist Gully Jimson in his seminal novel The Horses Mouth. He then spent some time during the second half of the 1950s in St Ebba's Mental Hospital where he was subjected to electric shock treatments, after which he abandoned painting for twenty years.

A part of the puzzle lies in what David Lee has called his "romantic loneliness", a factor, "common among English artists whose nonconformity needles the establishment", which meant that, like so many other non-conformists, he was doomed almost to be forgotten or overlooked. He was by his own admission, "always an outsider".

Certainly he did not seek to ingratiate himself with the art establishment. "His best examples were sold off for next to nothing so as to get some money to buy drink or to give away to strangers in the pub". This did not auger well for the kind of relationship between artist and dealer that was then current in Britain – indeed it was near fatal for Wilde.

The destruction of much of his early work during the Blitz when Wilde served in the Pioneer Corps did not help matters. And yet none of these explanations seems fully satisfactory. They point maybe to the 'form' of Gerald Wilde's life, an outer shell (that without doubt had a very real and often destructive impact on his artistic development and life) but they do not get us close to the 'content' of the tortured 'genius' of Wilde's work nor do they completely explain his lack of recognition.

To understand the apparent contradiction of his immediate recognition by peers and 'invisibility' to the general public for a long period after 1955, we have to look to the work Wilde produced.

Its uniqueness and refusal to be categorised are at the heart of the question of recognition. Indeed, in the 2002 Barbican exhibition catalogue Transition: The London Art Scene in the Fifties Martin Harrison devotes four pages to Wilde's work arguing that he "qualifies as a special case for many reasons, not least his work – which has been called Abstract Expressionism and Neo-Romantic – firmly resists classification. He remains, as he was in life, difficult to pin down". For this he would be "denied establishment recognition almost as much as was David Bomberg" and characteristically he was "omitted from 60 Paintings in '51 yet commissioned to supply the cover for the exhibition catalogue!" (Organised by the Arts Council as part of the Festival of Britain.)

The trouble was that much of what Wilde produced always turned out to be unique. And as has been argued by Hannah Arendt, "posthumous fame seems, then, to be the lot of the unclassifiable ones, that is, those whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre that lends itself to future classification".

Jeff Jackson

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