Mark Gertler
- Artist: Mark Gertler
- Published: 2002
- Publisher: John Murray Publishers Ltd, London
- Edition: First
- Format: Hardback
- Height: 24cm
- Pages: 398
- Illustrations: Illustrated in black and white with some colour images.
£40.00
Add to basketMark Gertler
This biography of Mark Gertler reappraises an extraordinary artist, a figure who fascinated his contemporaries. Gertler was admired and encouraged by Walter Sickert, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Henry Moore. Yet despite his seeming at ease in London's society, he himself felt his Jewishness and his working-class background as insuperable barriers, and his artistic ambition gradually alienated him even from the people among whom he'd grown up. He found no happiness and at the age of 48 killed himself. A few weeks before his death he had dinner with Virginia Woolf and impressed her with his "fanatical devotion to his art". Hearing of his death she wondered if he had been "perhaps too rigid, too self-centred, too honest and too narrow" to be happy. But with this "intellect and interest" she asked "why did the personal life become too painful?" This is one of the questions Sarah MacDougall explores in her life of this complex man, whose powerful images, like the "Merry-go-round" or the "Creation of Eve" have lost none of their disturbing eloquence.
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Artists Biography
Mark Gertler was born in 1891 in a slum in the East End of London, the fifth child of a family of Jewish immigrants from Poland.
Already talented he gained a place at the Slade School of Art when he was just 16. He became friends with such fellow-artists as Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth and Stanley Spencer, and attracted patrons including William Rothenstein and Lady Ottoline Morrell.
Gertler later suffered with depression and shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, committed suicide.
His masterpiece, The Merry-Go-Round (1916), today hangs prominently at Tate Modern in London.
