FOR an artist such as Augustus John, so unjustly, neglected during recent years, a book on him of over seven hundred pages would have given him immense pleasure - if only he were still alive and could see this new, compact version of Michael Holroyd's original, two volume biography.
Augustus John's fame has of late been eclipsed by the praise given to his sister, Gwen John. Certainly, this is just praise, but the two artists cannot really be compared, and are as unlike as, say, Bonnard and Vuillard, Bonnard the more exuberant and colourful painter and Vuillard the more sensitive and reclusive one.
Today, if an artist wishes to be fashionable and famous he must have some easily recognisable and, above all, new gimmick to catch the public's attention poorly drawn drug fiends jabbing themselves and others, or perhaps full frontal nudes, male or female, extremely ugly and fat, posed separately or together, with a lack of sympathy even from the artist. And then there are the slaughtered calves and dead sheep...
Augustus John has none of these gimmicks to show us. Few artists, even among the greatest, create their best work late in life, and certainly this is true of August us John. That he was an extremely great draughtsman, Michael Holroyd shows us in many illustrations, and even some of his late drawings, such as one of Cecil Beaton (not in Mr Holroyd's book), is remarkable for the way it portrays a character those piercing and intense, ice cold eyes are brilliantly executed.
The jacket of this book, a self portrait of Augustus John, is a picture worthy of a place in any gallery of 20th century portraiture. Many of the little landscapes showing his children by his wife, Ida, or by Dorelia, his mistress for so many years, some of them painted in Ireland, are ravishing little masterpieces.
When I was young, before the war, I met the great tousled genius, at his home in Wiltshire, Fryern Court, or with collector friends in London. He could always hold the room and was as spellbinding as Nicolette Devas remembers him in her brilliant memoir, Two Flamboyant Fathers. At one of our meetings, Augustus signed for me probably one of the first little oils he ever did, at the Slade School, a dark, Delacroix like picture of Christ and his disciples - presumably Augustus himself as Christ.
When at school at Marlborough I used to meet Ursula Tyrwhitt, whom Holroyd claims was John's first serious girlfriend, later during the war, I often saw Euphemia Lamb at her goose farm and, even later, Mavis Cole was my housekeeper. Tristan, her son by Augustus John, was nearly adopted by Augustus and Dorelia; when his father first saw him he exclaimed: "What a whopper!" Poppet was the only John daughter I knew, and danced with, and was very attracted by another life enhancer, like her father and his mistresses.
Many of his female sitters were also life enhancers: Suggia, the great cellist, the Italian Marchesa Casati, the (then) richest woman in Italy, who had her marble palace floor in Rome taken to Venice when she moved there for the summer. Tallulah Bankhead, the actress who dazzled London and the Bright Young Things in the 20s and early 30s, also modelled for him, as did the mother of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. There was also the aristocratic Ottoline Morrell.
Michael Holroyd's book is exemplary of its kind. It is brilliantly annotated the notes alone run to nearly 100 pages, and a packed index mentions almost every social and artistic celebrity of the period.
