Two Artists Are Reunited in Norfolk
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And here is Christopher Wood’s painting of composer Constant Lambert in 1926. At only twenty, Lambert was commissioned by Diaghilev to write the musical score for the ballet Romeo and Juliet. Wood himself worked on the scenery for this work, without formally having secured a commission. Confusion surrounds the disagreements with Diaghilev, who “knows nothing about painting,” according to Wood. “He pokes his nose in and makes the most ridiculous and useless changes.” Wood was either sacked or resigned, to be replaced by the surrealist Max Ernst.

Paradoxically, no portrait of Cocteau himself is present, yet his influence haunts the whole show, since his introduction of Wood to the pleasures of opium indirectly brought about the artist’s death at the age of 29. Wood’s addiction led to instability—he even began carrying a revolver around in London. After visiting his mother and sister in Salisbury, Wood impulsively jumped under a train, though his death was officially recorded as an accident. From his discovery by the more established artist Augustus John in the fashionable Café Royal, through his strongly Picasso-inspired phase, Wood was, in truth, only able to gesture at his potential. Yet, despite his brief life, his name is better known today than that of Morris. Wood has been the subject of a biography by Richard Ingleby (1995), and also figures as one of three artists to die young in Sebastian Faulks’ multiple biography The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives (1996).

His beauty must have helped. A remarkable canvas here by Morris is titled The Dancing Sailor (1925). Possibly the young man, depicted cavorting among cows before a backdrop of sails, was indeed a Breton sailor.  But he may also have been a portrait, or partial portrait, of his friend Kit. Wood’s own work on show at his most homoerotic is undoubtedly Exercises (1925), in which a dozen naked youths swim, wrestle, stretch, and disport themselves on trapezes. A clothed instructor massages a gymnast’s leg muscles. In the foreground, two monocled, velvet-suited æsthetes—clearly not in the room for physical exertion—chat and drink.

Morris’ life narrative contrasted absolutely with that of the bisexual, restless Wood. Morris fell in love with another painter, Arthur Lett-Haines. The pair moved around, from Newlyn in Cornwall, to Paris, then London, and finally settled on a farm in Suffolk, where they spent decades in contented cohabitation. Lett-Haines died in 1978, Morris in 1982. Although London’s Tate Gallery hosted a retrospective two years later, Morris’ fame has sunk since then. His primitive, post-impressionist style remains striking and attractive, but not particularly original.

Wood’s most recent major exhibition was in 1997, titled A Painter Between Two Cornwalls. This was a reference to the affinity between his Cornish paintings—several of which are usually on display at the Tate’s Cornish outpost, Tate St. Ives—and those undertaken in Cornouaille, a remote area of Brittany. Perhaps the finest of his paintings here, however, normally resides in the Kettle’s Yard gallery, Cambridge. In this huge self-portrait from 1927 (over three feet by four feet), Wood expressed his devotion to Pablo Picasso quite literally, by wearing a triangle-patterned jumper suggestive of the figure of the Harlequin. He sits self-assuredly, palette in hand, on a balcony, the hill of Montmartre rising up behind him. Wood’s penetrating blue eyes stare straight out of the canvas, asking what might have been.

Richard Canning’s most recent book is an edition of Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory for Penguin Classics (2012).