Christopher Wood’s untimely death aged 30 has made him one of the most enigmatic and heroic figures of 20th Century British art, a tragic and romantic talent, who killed himself whilst in the midst of an opium addiction just as the wider world was taking note of his artistic gifts. Commentary on Wood’s legacy has encompassed both the salacious, notably as one subject of Sebastian Faulks’s The Fatal Englishman, and serious academic and commercial appreciation, including a major retrospective at Pallant House Gallery in 2016.
Born in the North of England, an injury as a teenager, whilst his father was away as a doctor during WWI, led to a long period of recuperation at home, nursed by his mother. Aged just 20, Wood left England for Paris. In the 1920s, Paris was unquestionably the home of the avant-garde, a metropolis of artists, writers, socialites, dancers and émigré White Russians. Ambitious, determined and oscillating between supreme self-confidence and intense doubt, Wood embraced the social hedonism and creative milieu of Paris.
By the end of 1921 Wood had met Jose Antonio de Gandarillas, an extremely well-connected Chilean diplomat, who acted somewhat like a patron and protector, and possibly lover, to Wood. Together Wood and Gandarillas travelled widely throughout Europe and north Africa, and Gandarillas gave Wood rooms in his apartment for when Wood wasn’t working at his studio. Wood counted amongst his social circle Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Jeanne and Jean Bourgoint, Meraud Guinness, of the Guinness family and whom Wood had a troubled romance, Frosca Munster, a Russian émigré and Wood’s lover from 1928, and Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballet Russes with whom Wood had a disastrous attempt at collaboration, amongst many others. Wood spent the early part of the decade furiously looking and learning at the greats of 20th century Modernism, progressing through the work of Picasso, Matisse and Van Gogh, and incorporating their innovations into his work.
Though Wood immersed himself in the hedonism of Paris, he remained nonetheless susceptible to the allure of the rural idyll, in part due to the importance of ‘going away’ to the Primitivists whom Wood so admired: Van Gogh to live with Dutch peasants and to establish an artist’s commune in Arles and Gaugin to Brittany and Tahiti. For Wood, the antithesis to the debauchery of city life was personified in the lives of Ben and Winifred Nicholson, whom he was introduced to in 1926 by Cedric Morris (see lot 61). Winifred recalled later of the meeting:
‘…we were going out to dinner with Jim [Ede] – and somebody was talking with Ben and Cedric down in Ben’s studio. I had no idea who it was but they went on talking and talking, he with a voice that moved me so strangely.’
Winifred and Ben saw Wood’s work for the first time the next day at Gandarillas’s flat in Cheyne Walk:
‘Crowded together in his small bedroom were an amazing array of canvases. He produced masterpiece upon masterpiece. The Red Dogs; the White Ship; the portrait of Tony, a nude, a number of still and dark Cornish landstrips…we walked home in the high skies. Here was England’s first painter. His vision is true, his grasp is real, his power is life itself.’
Ben and Winifred supported and promoted Wood’s work at every turn, with Ben bringing him into the 7 & 5 Society. 1928 was a seminal year in the history of British Modernism: together Wood, Ben and Winifred worked side-by-side, first at Bankshead, the Nicholsons’ Cumbrian home, and then in St Ives where they ‘discovered’ Alfred Wallis, the untrained naïve painter.
The two divergent strands of Wood’s life – the artist at the heart of the avant-garde social and creative circles of sophisticated Paris and the thoughtful recluse who longed for the simplicity and peace of the rustic life – synthesized when Wood discovered Tréboul in Brittany in the summer of 1929 and to where he returned the following summer.
‘I sit on the green grass banks above the sea each evening which becomes like a lake, pale blue like milk and lovely ivory-coloured sailing ships go past very slowly…I can’t tell you the beauty of this place with dark fir trees and the little white houses like jewels, the curious faces of the people like Holbein’s drawings, there is such dignity and compactness about everything.’
The paintings Wood produced over these few months were the pinnacle of his achievements: everything he had learnt in Paris from the Modernist masters and all he had developed alongside Ben and Winifred coalesced and distilled through his individual vision in the works of 1929 and 1930. In Tréboul, Wood discovered the wild, romantic Brittany landscape of cliffs and surging seas, the rituals and rites of Breton Catholicism and culture and the perilous, noble existence of the local fishermen.
He created some of his famous paintings in 1929 and 1930 including Building the Boat, Tréboul (Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge), Sleeping Fisherman, Ploaré, Brittany (Laing Art Gallery), and Nude Boy in a Bedroom (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art). Symbolic, mythological and surreal elements gradually entered his painting, perhaps a result of Wood’s increasingly pronounced opium addiction, culminating in the two extraordinary final paintings, often taken as signals as to where his painting might have progressed, Zebra and Parachute (Tate) and Tiger and Arc de Triomphe (The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.).
The present work, Trėboul, seems to capture in paint form the description that Wood wrote to his mother when he first encountered the Breton village. We look across a bay, populated with fishing boats, to the cliffs and small white houses on the far side. A church with a prominent belltower stands proud to the left, overlooking the calm and alluringly blue sea. Thick white clouds sink into the horizon line. A frequently employed technique at the time, Wood scores the scene with vertical incisions, mark making that clearly demonstrates the incredible vigour and passion with which Wood worked during the summer of 1930.
