10/07/24
Augustus John and the First Crisis of Brilliance
Piano Nobile, London
26 April – 13 July 2024
There is something really rather special about turning up at a gallery, seeing work by an artist you haven’t heard of, saying their name aloud, questioningly, to your friend, and having a voice pipe up behind you – which turns out to be that of the gallery researcher, Luke Farey – offering a full background of the artist, and his model, in an infectiously enthusiastic manner. The artist was Derwent Lees; the model, who went on to become Lees’s wife, a young woman who was to go by various names over the years but was primarily known as Lyndra. This introduction felt something like making the acquaintance of friends of friends at a dinner party, which, in this instance, would have been being hosted by Augustus John, the protagonist of this exhibition and of the exhibited friendship group, in the apartment – a former brothel – at 21 Fitzroy Street, in London, which he shared with his sister Gwen and other students, while studying at the Slade School of Art. (Although it may have had to be a party without dinner, since, as John writes in his autobiography: “We shared rooms together subsisting, like monkeys, on a diet of fruit and nuts.”)
Read my full review here