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DOROTHY AND THE OLD MASTERS 

Following Bomberg’s lead, Dorothy, like his other pupils, constantly referred to past generations of artists rather than any contemporary painters. Although possessed of a range of quite radical ideas in both art and life (Cliff Holden, Dorothy’s partner from the age of 17 to 28, was Chairman of the Anarchist Federation and organiser of illegal ‘wildcat’ strikes), the group nonetheless developed their own intellectual pantheon of greats from the past. Musically, Dorothy adored Wagner, Beethoven, Mahler and Berlioz, and often sang parts of Handel’s Messiah. In literature, her shelves were densely packed with both classical and avant-garde writing, by Tolstoy, Wilde, Chekhov, Cocteau and Nabokov (among many others). And in art, Dorothy and the rest of the group traced a thread through art history (with occasional digressions) of their primary influences: from Giotto through Cimabue and Masaccio to Michelangelo, and thence through Titian and Rembrandt, Goya and Velasquez, Chardin, Turner, Delacroix, Géricault, Courbet, late Monet and Van Gogh to Cézanne. The obverse side of this was their dismissal of, for instance, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Ingres, David, Meissonier, André Lhote and Fernand Léger. 



























The ‘Ignudi’ are 20 seated male nudes, serving a decorative function at the corners of the main bays but also having an iconographic significance as "intermediary spirits between men and the Godhead" (Charles de Tolnay). Michelangelo’s models for the Ignudi were largely his own studio assistants whose extraordinary musculature was developed by carrying blocks of marble from a young age.
Alice Mayes, Bomberg’s first wife, wrote: “David explained that the modern pictures had their beginning with the Old Masters and Michael Angelo was the chief of these.’ His followers felt a strong attachment to this lineage, and indeed Cliff Holden recalled that Peter (Miles) Richmond had the notion that “to be a great artist one should emulate Michelangelo and therefore he did not wash and he wore the same old paint-covered clothes and a dirty old mac which was his habitual uniform”. As Michelangelo was the greatest of the early Masters, so the Sistine Ceiling was regarded at the time as his highpoint as a painter.

There are sadly very few remaining records of Dorothy’s own thoughts on art, and so we have to piece together the often contradictory recollections of her immediate circle. But when this group of drawings came to light earlier this year, there was sufficient information known for us to work out her probable motivations. During the 1960s Dorothy took inspiration from a number of paintings from the past, works that she would dismantle in her own mind and then re-assemble according to her own sensibilities and taste, and the set of beliefs passed down from Bomberg including (to some extent) the mantra of the ‘Spirit in the Mass’. Sometimes she would have spent hours in front of these paintings (often works in the National Gallery), or that she had seen on her travels, or sometimes just come across in reproduction. 

Of the two paintings she exhibited at the Hayward Gallery in the exhibition ‘British Painting 1974’ one was a very personal re-working of Courbet’s ‘The Studio’ measuring 70 x 120 inches. In a surviving fragment of a letter, she discusses the struggle to paint the foreground nude in the manner of one of her own nudes while suiting the whole composition. This was the conundrum that inspired her, to create something fresh and new that was both true to her and her artistic principles, while also true to the original artwork. 









In the case of Dorothy’s drawings after the ‘Ignudi’ from Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling we can reconstruct her processes with some confidence. All of the drawings are dated August 1960, so we know exactly when they were executed. Meanwhile, most bear numbers from 59-76, which tally with a numbering system for the various elements of the Sistine Ceiling used in Ludwig Goldscheider’s comprehensive book on Michelangelo, which was still the standard work on the artist in 1960 (the images reproduced in the catalogue for comparison with Dorothy’s drawings are from a later edition of Goldsheider’s tome). 

However, it would clearly be impossible to create such lively and highly personal recreations of the figures from such small reproductions, nor would Dorothy have attempted it. The drawings are clearly closely related to the many charcoal drawings that Dorothy, like all of Bomberg’s followers, produced in endless life classes throughout her life. According to Dorothy’s younger sister, Val, at this time Dorothy’s most used model was a young man, John Hall, who lived above her in St Marks Road. And so we can vividly recreate the scene like a tableau from an old film: Dorothy spending a sweltering August in her flat in North Kensington (recorded temperatures were around 85°F / 30°C) with the upstairs neighbour posing nude in close imitation of the figures illustrated in Dorothy’s copy of Goldscheider.