Walter Sickert and Cornelia Parker—A Tale of Two Artists

In the summer of 2022, there were two major exhibitions at Tate Britain in London, UK. The first of them displayed the paintings of Walter Sickert. The second exhibited mainly installations by Cornelia Parker, born fourteen years after Sickert's death. Together, the experience of seeing two such very different approaches to art was a radical and exciting experience.

Sharing themes of power imbalance, cruelty, and difficult states of mind, the works of Walter Sickert (born in Germany, 1860) and Cornelia Parker (born in ) might prove stimulating for forensic colleagues. Both artists were not so distant from each other in time but their works feels light years away from each other, suggesting rapid change in British society.

The Sickert exhibition starts gloomily with melancholic and moody portraits. Sickert moved to England with his family when he was six, but maintained his contact with Europe during his career. Sickert and Freud were contemporaries. Both of them died in England having been born on the Continent.

European scenes take up a lot of the beginning of the exhibition. Many of Sickert's more engaging paintings are of sites in France and Italy. As with Freud, European culture simmers in his work. The paintings of Venice and the beaches of France feel very European in their subject matter and composition. Sickert was fortunate in having both Whistler and Degas as teachers. Before joining Whistler on sketching trips, Sickert prepared Whistler's palette and was influenced by the dark tones. Later, when Degas became his mentor in 1885, Sickert adapted bolder colours and a more open sense of sky and light. In Sickert's work the heaviness of the paint can feel as oppressive as the golden frames enclosing the canvases, even when colours brighten the seascapes. The paintings can feel pompous and brooding like a second-rate Victorian novel. Even his scenes of music halls lack vitality and the bleary faces of the characte