‘The walls of the gallery were splattered with blood’: The Portraits of Cedric Morris

Cedric Morris and Lett Haines: Teaching Art and Life (ed.), exh cat., Norwich Castle Museum and National Museums & Galleries of Wales, Cardiff, 2002

A visitor to the Guggenheim Jeune Gallery in London in March 1938 would have been confronted with an unnerving spectacle. For his exhibition there Cedric Morris hung the gallery walls three deep with nearly one hundred portraits, twice as many as were listed in the catalogue. The paintings provoked strong reactions. Peggy Guggenheim recalled that at the private view ‘one of the guests… so much disliked the portraits that in order to show his disapproval he started burning the catalogues. Cedric Morris, naturally infuriated, hit (him) and a bloody battle took place. The walls of the gallery were splattered with blood…’

Guggenheim recalls that Morris had not wanted to make a show of the “beautiful flower pictures for which he was famous.’ Instead, the artist had persuaded her to let him show his portraits despite the fact that, like the disruptive private view guest, she believed them to be ‘in more cases nearly caricatures, all of them on the unpleasant side.’[1]

I don’t believe it was Morris’ purpose, in painting such portraits as those of Lett Haines (no. 2, p.60) or Paul Odo Cross (no.11, p24), both of which were included in the Guggenheim show, to caricature or critique his sitters. They were, after all, his friends and students. Morris, as the critic Eric Newton had it, ‘merely states the facts as interest to him…’ He found Morris’ work ‘a welcome relief from the flatteries and evasions of ordinary portrait exhibitions.’[2]  If we see caricature of critique that is our reading, not necessarily the artist’s intention. The uncompromising commitment to painting honestly and directly what is before him, rather than falling into any preconceived manner or method leads us now to believe that Morris was pursuing some ulterior agenda. We are accustomed to flattery in portraiture yet these paintings make no concession to beauty. In this respect Morris’ portraits of the 20s and 30s, which were disturbing at the time, remain so even now.

Today Morris is still best known for his ‘beautiful flower pictures.’ However, it is the portraits which represent his most distinctive and radical achievement. Individually they offer us powerful and convincing statements of personality, and as a body of work they present a sustained and vivid picture of an extraordinary milieu. They were distinct from other work being made in Britain at the time – being closer in sensibility to contemporary developments in France and Germany.

The purpose of this essay then is to offer an argument as to why we should reassess Morris’ achievement and admit that if he is not the foremost portraitist working in Britain in the 20s and 30s he is certainly in the front rank. Compared to the painters of Camden Town and Bloomsbury, and the artist who to the general public perhaps best represented ‘advanced’ painting at this time, Augustus John, Morris’ best work appears surprisingly modern – ahead of its time in that it seems to articulate (or at least indicate) the existential condition of the individual. These stark heads, subjected to searching examination, convey a powerful sense of the isolated individual in a way that anticipates developments in the 50s, and works by the so-called School of London. Lucien Freud has recalled that, in comparison to other English portraiture of the 30s and 40s Morris’s portraits were often ‘revealing in a way that was almost improper’[3], something that could undoubtedly be said of his own work.

Why then, are Morris’s portraits so distinctive? The most striking aspect of his work is its direct engagement with the subject, which Richard Morphet has characterised as scrutiny and the ‘exceptional directness with which eh realises the subject and communicates its sheer existence.’[4]  We are given a sense that the artist has gained some kind of insight into the essential nature of his subject. Morris wrote: ‘There must always be great understanding between the painter and the thing painted, otherwise there can be no conviction and no truth. This might be called ‘vision’ and reality, as opposed to realism. Reality is knowledge and realism is only the appearance of knowledge…’[5] What he is after then, is a way of representing what he sees, without resorting to fakery or mannerism, and in his best work he achieves it.

The essential characteristic of a Morris portrait, which allows the communication of this ‘knowledge’, is simplicity: of conception, form and composition.

In his use of simplification (and sometimes exaggeration) of facial features Morris seems on occasion to veer uncomfortably close to caricature[6], but his use of such techniques is always in the service of achieving a direct and intense rendering of the subject rather than for comic or satiric effect. Morris’ use of reduction in his work is in part inspired by the pared-down quality of Chinese painting, which he admired. He wrote: ‘in an indifferent picture the usual redundancy of non-essentials betrays the poverty of vision…. In the monotype of Chao Meng-Chien (thirteenth century)… no brush stroke cold be omitted or one added.’[7] Morris’ best paintings have the compelling completeness he describes here – as if the image already exited and the artist has simply revealed it. This is borne out in the way that he painted, as if ‘unrolling’ the painting, without preliminary drawing. Maggi Hambling described seeing Morris art work on a painting: ‘He’d started in the top left corner and he’d got about two thirds of the way down, and he was going down to the bottom right corner where he would put his signature…’[8]

In composition too Morris pares away the image, focusing on heads and faces almost to the exclusion of all else. Where background is included it is usually a cursory evocation of a generic space – lines and blocks of colour, which might perhaps represent a doorway or window (see the portraits of Lucian Freud, no.31, p.61 and Glyn Morgan, no.38, p.66). Again, the effect is to intensify the psychological impact of the image, to direct all attention to the features and expression of the subject, as if we are making an examination in close focus beneath a microscope. A secondary effect of this is to isolate the individual – which not only gives an impression of monumentality but also singularity – thus giving us images with a pronounced existential quality.

Morris is often praised for his use of colour.[9] His flower paintings and landscapes demonstrate his skill – and the enduring freshness of his colours – but it is perhaps surprising to note that in his portraits too, colour plays a crucial role. He characteristically places his sitters against a strongly coloured background, which either corresponds with, or complements, the sitters clothing, thus creating a unified composition and intensifying the impact of the image, or which creates a psychological space. For example, Mary Butts (no.8, p.62) – a notorious partygoer and heavy drug user – is depicted against a hellish red background. Her orange jumper, golden hair, and the odd greenish tints that light her face, together with the peculiarly transfixed expression on her face, all combine to create a singularly intense image.

Morris’ work of this period seems to have more in common with contemporary concerns on the continent than with British art. Morris and Lett Haines had moved to Paris at the end of 1920, and their social circle there included not only such ex-pats as Nina Hamnett and Mary Butts, but also many international avant-garde, including Kisling. Morris’ use of radical simplification (and distortion) in his work of the 20s leads us inevitably to comparisons with the work of Kisling and more particularly with his friends, Soutine and Modigliani (who died in 1920). Morris would almost certainly have seem portraits by Modigliani, which had been included in a show of French art at the Mansard Gallery in London in the summer of 1919, and which would have been on show at dealers such as Paul Guillaume in Paris when Morris was there. Morris and Modigliani’s drawing styles are certainly very close to each other, making telling use of reduction of form and purity of line. Morris’ portraits are closest to the least excessively stylised of Modigliani’s work such as the portrait of Chaim Soutine c. 1916 (Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart) and the Portrait of a Girl c.1917 (Tate, London), which was exhibited at the Lefevre Galleries in London, in March 1929. One could also draw comparisons with other artists working in Paris at this time, particularly those involved with the ‘return to order’, such as Picasso, Derain and Severini, in their use of clear, simple forms.[10]

Morris and Lett used Paris as a base and travelled widely in Europe in the early 20s. They were in Italy in 1922 – and the influence of the metaphysical painters such as De Chirio briefly manifests itself in works such as Golden Auntie 1923 (no. 7 p.51) and Patisseries and Croissant c. 1922 (no.5, p.50) – and in Germany in 1921 and 1922.

Morris was certainly interested in the early German masters such as Cranach and Dürer, but the question of whether or not he was familiar with, and influenced by, the artists of the German Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’) is more difficult to answer. Painters such as Otto Dix and Christian Schad were not much known in Paris and London at this time. However, it is possible that Morris saw work by these artists when he was in Berlin in 1921 and 1922. It is highly likely that by 1922 he had come across Dix, who had exhibited paintings of prostitutes in Berlin to general outrage and was certainly the best known (or notorious) avant-garde artist in Germany. The hellish reds, pinks and oranges in Morris’ 1924 portrait of Mary Butts may recall Dix’s celebrated portrait of the journalist Sylvia Von Harden (painted in 1926), however Morris did not subscribe to the kind of ideas that Dix was pursuing and which were then being characterised as Verism. ‘Verism’ (or ‘verismo’ in Italian), was a term first used by a reviewer in the avant-garde periodical Das Kunstblat to characterise a style of uncompromising realist painting, somewhat old-masterish in finish. More precisely Paul Ferdinand Schmidt (whom Dix painted) used the term in 1924 to describe a socially critical tendency and ‘the pessimistic rejection of the illusion of beauty’[11] in the work of Dix and others. Morris’ work certainly rejects the illusion of beauty, but to say that it does so through pessimism and as a means of effecting a social critique would be false.

In Britain Morris was prominent in the art world in the 20s and 30s, although subsequently he tended to be neglected in accounts of the period. Reviewing the period 1918-38, in 1951, Hesketh Hubbard asserted that ‘the outstanding portraits came from John, Orpen, Walter Russell, McEvoy, Connard and Glyn Philpot.’[12] Hubbard is writing of more academic portraiture here, but if we turn to Modernist practice in Britain we find that no other artist was making such a sustained engagement with the genre at that time. Many of Morris’ friends and contemporaries – including Wood, Gertler and Roberts – make the occasional portrait, but it cannot be said to represent a central part of their practice in the way it does for Morris.

While in a wider context there are strong similarities between Morris’ work and that of a number of his contemporaries,[13] in portraiture Morris is a singular case. Not only is his commitment to the genre unusual but his highly personal approach to the problems of painting a convincing depiction of a human being is distinct. While contemporaries as varied as John Banting, Thomas Lowinsky and Stanley Spencer all painted exceptional portraits during this time, Morris still seems to stand apart for the uncompromising intensity of his best work.

In later years Morris’ portraits have also been important for his two best-known pupils, both of whom have professed admiration for this aspect of his work above all others. Lucian Freud’s early work is much indebted to his teacher, as can be seen particularly in his own portrait of Morris (no. 92, p.97) and later works such as his portrait of John Deakin 1963-4 – all ears and nose, close cropped, careful scrutiny and focus on the shape of the head and individual features – which also demonstrates a strong concern with surface texture. While Maggi Hambling’s exceptionally fluid later style, as seen in her recent portraits of her father, is far removed from that of Morris, her work of the 70’s, and in particular her portraits of her neighbour Frances Rose are much indebted to her former teacher, both in terms of composition and in the handling of the paint.

The incidents at Guggenheim Jeaune in 1938, and Peggy Guggenheim’s comments that the works were unpleasant caricatures, give us a valuable insight into the way that Morris’ portraits were viewed (particularly in relation to the flower paintings) at that time by general public, cognoscenti, and the artist himself. Largely they were misunderstood. We should not be so hasty in judgement. These portraits are some of the most remarkable paintings done in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century.

[1] Peggy Guggenheim, Out of this Century: Confessions of an Art Addict, Andre Deutsch 1980 pp.171-2. Another account of the opening is in Joan Warburton’s npublished memoir A Painter’s Progress (TGA 968.2.20): ‘I heard later that one sitter who did not consider his portrait flattering was so angry that he took it off the wall and stamped on it.’

[2] Eric Newton, ‘Uncompromising Portraiture: the temptations of water-colour’ in Sunday Times 27 Mar 1938

[3] Richard Morphet, Cedric Morris, exh, cat., Tate Gallery 1984 p85

[4] ibid. p.80. For a discussion of the notion of ‘scrutiny’ in English art in this period see Richard Morphet ‘Realism in English Art, 1919-1939’, Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, nos.7/8, 1981, pp. 342-345

[5] Cedric Morris, ‘Concerning Flower Painting’, The Studio CXXIII May 1942 pp.121-132

[6] For a discussion of caricature in art see E.H. Gombrich, Art & Illusion, Phaidon 1960, pp.279-303

[7] Cedric Morris, op cit.

[8] Maggi Hambling, unpublished interview with the author 30 May 1997

[9] Morphet calls him ‘one of the most exceptional colourists in twentieth century British art’ p.87

[10] Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910-1930, exh. cat., Tate Gallery 1990. See in particular cats. 48, 152, 156, 160

[11] Quoted in Sarah O’Brien Twohig, Otto Dix, exh. cat., Tate Gallery 1992, p.108

[12] Hesketh Hubbard, A 100 Years of British Painting 1851-1951, Longmans 1951 p.267. Surprisingly, the book makes no mention of Morris.

[13] See Morphet pp.34-41