Mark Gertler
The tortured artist, never sure of his own ability while hailed as a genius by others, is a familiar figure. For Mark Gertler, born into desperate poverty in Spitalfields, but to be hailed as one of the greatest painters of the early 20th century, it was a terrible contradiction that would lead to suicide.
Gertler was born in 1891, the child of Austrian-Jewish parents. With the family struggling to make ends meet, Mark had to leave school – and become a breadwinner – at an early age. So it was that he became apprenticed to a stained-glass maker.
But he was already showing a keen interest in art and, in his spare hours, attended classes at Regent Street Polytechnic.
His teachers were quick to spot the youngster’s promise, but to leave regular paid work and pursue a career in art seemed an impossible dream. Gertler’s case was brought to the attention of Sir William Rothenstein, who persuaded the Jewish Education Aid Society to grant Gertler a scholarship for the famed Slade School of Art.
But if Gertler’s artistic talent was precociously obvious, so was the mental instability that would dog him for the rest of his short life. In 1906, in his first months at the polytechnic, he started to suffer long
nights of sleeplessness and days of depression.
Still, from 1909 to 1912 he worked, and shone, at the Slade. Despite the presence of luminous contemporaries
such as Dora Carrington, Paul Nash and CRW Nevinson, Gertler won the first prize for Head Painting.
Gertler may have been plagued by insecurities but he was accepted for his talent by the Bloomsbury set. It was a relationship immortalised in the 1995 film Carrington, starring Emma Thompson as Dora and Rufus Sewell as Mark.
They came from very different social circles – the upper-class Carrington, Nash and Lytton Strachey, and the poor immigrant from Spitalfields – but Gertler drew on the East End to give terrifying power to his work.
Gertler’s painting ‘Rabbi and Daughter’ (1912) looked back to his childhood. But as he worked among the falling bombs of the first air raids in 1914 and 1915, the horror of the Great War started to permeate his work.
In 1916 he finished his masterpiece, ‘Merry Go Round’ (pictured above) in which he seemed to be pulling all the strands of his short life together.
“With its harsh flickering restlessness, the painting seemed to be a comment on Mark’s life: Whitechapel slum, young artist’s Bohemia, fashionable society, the Garsington intelligentsia,” wrote critic William Rothenstein. “It was impossible, too, to look at these mechanical soldiers going round and round without recalling the horrors of the deadlocked Western Front.”
Gertler’s painting had caught the mood of the times. His close friend DH Lawrence, who was to pen Lady Chatterley’s Lover, wrote to Mark in 1916: “It seems to me the stark truth one has inside one is all that matters, whether it is paint, or books or life… I saw the Daily Mirror today – the Zeppelin wrecks etc. How exhausted one is by all this fury of strident lies and foul death.”
The painting had a stunning effect on people of the time. Lawrence wrote: “Your terrible and beautiful picture is great and true, but horrible and terrifying. I’m not sure I wouldn’t be too frightened to come and look at the original.”
But Gertler still spoke to his friends of his insecurities. To Rothenstein, he wrote in 1925: “You ask what is the matter with me? It is the greatest crisis of my life… What is my value as an artist? Is there anything there worthwhile after all?”
Gertler’s mental state was not aided by poor health, triggered by his impoverished childhood. He suffered from tuberculosis throughout his life, constantly moving in and out of sanatoriums. And in 1939, with war once again on the horizon, Gertler, overcome by depression and with his glittering early successes behind him, took his own life.
For more information, see:
Film – Mark Gertler, Fragments of a Biography (1981), starring Anthony Sher; Carrington (1995) starring Emma Thompson and Rufus Sewell.
Book – Mark Gertler, Biography of a Painter (1972) John Woodeson.