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Walter Sickert, “Le Lit de Fer (The Iron Bed),” 1905, pastel on paper, private collection.

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‘WALTER SICKERT’ WILL OPEN OCT 25 AT LONDON’S COURTAULD INSTITUTE w/1 cut

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LONDON — The paintings of the female nude produced by Walter Sickert (1860–1942) in and around Camden Town between 1905 and 1912 are among the artist’s most significant contributions to Twentieth Century British art.

“Walter Sicker: The Camden Town Nudes” will be on view at the Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, Somerset House, London October 25–January 20, and brings together a selection of more than 25 of his canvases and related drawings from public and private collections to provide the first major account of his reinvention of the nude as a subject for modern paintings. It is the first of three exhibitions that celebrate the Courtauld Institute of Art’s 75th anniversary.

The exhibition will explore the ways in which Sickert developed an uncompromisingly realist approach to the nude in order to address major social and artistic concerns of the early Twentieth Century. His four famously enigmatic Camden Town Murder paintings will be brought together for the first time as the most powerful expression of his fascination with the darker aspects of urban life in Edwardian London.

The exhibition begins with examples of Sicker’s earliest treatments of the nude, such as “The Rose Shoe,” circa 1902–05, probably produced while living in Neuville in Normandy, and the pastel, “Le Lit de Fer (The Iron Bed),” circa 1905, one of the first nudes he exhibited publicly. These works show his early concern for integrating the nude figure within a grittily real interior, sparsely furnished with an iron bedstead.

Following his return from France in 1905 to settle in London, Sickert set up various studios in the cheap lodging houses of Camden Town, which would form the settings for his most adventurous nudes, such as “La Hollandaise” and “The Iron Bedstead.”

Although he staged these scenes in his various studios in the area, the effect of Sickert’s treatment of the subject was to blur the boundaries of artifice and reality. In one of his most complex canvases, “The Studio: The Painting of a Nude,” Sickert takes his studio practice as the subject of the work itself, his own arm is shown cutting across the foreground of the composition caught in the act painting.

His ambition to create realist nudes achieved profound expression around 1908 with a group of four canvases that are known as the Camden Town Murder paintings; they include “L’Affaire de Camden Town” and “The Camden Town Murder.”

The exhibition concludes with works from around 1912, such as “Jack Ashore,” which effectively mark the culmination of his profound engagement with the nude and its pictorial and narrative possibilities.

In just over five years Sickert had produced a body of work that, as the exhibition will demonstrate, revitalized the possibilities of the genre and which can now be seen as a seminal moment in the history of modern British paintings. His influence continues to be felt in the work of artists such as Frank Auerbach and Lucien Freud.

Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery is at Somerset House, Strand. For information, www.courtauld.ac.uk or 44 (0) 20 7848 2526.