Portrait of the Week: John and Myfanwy Piper

Partly because I loved Frances Spalding's double biography but never got around to reviewing it and partly in anticipation of reading Alexandra Harris's Romantic Moderns; here are this fascinating twosome.

Buried Treasure: the life and visions of Rupert Lee

If you are an art loving treasure seeker in or around London this week and in need of a bit of an election antidote, you could do a lot worse than to visit the Rupert Lee Retrospective exhibition which is currently on at Gallery 27 in Cork Street. This is where I spent most of my bank holiday Monday and it was a pleasure.

Rupert Lee was one of the “golden generation” of pre-first world war Slade artists that included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer and Richard Nevinson. He was an extraordinary talent and a truly versatile man who turned his hand to painting, sculpting, printmaking and music. As a young artist he formed an especially close friendship with the artist Paul Nash and was also employed by the legendary theatre director, Edward Gordon Craig. For 10 years Lee served as the President of the London Group of Artists – an avant-garde collective and exhibiting society which in the first half of the twentieth century was responsible for showcasing some of the most interesting and innovative of British artists. As the London Group president, Lee was able to promote such names as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. In 1936 he was chairman of the International Surrealist exhibition at the Burlington Galleries – a properly bizarre event which featured Dylan Thomas offering visitors cups of boiled string with the query “weak or strong?” and Salvador Dali wandering around in a deep sea diving suit.

In short, Rupert Lee was at the forefront of the artistic community of his day. In addition to this, his own work was powerful and versatile. He exhibited many of the hallmarks of those who directly influenced him such as Roger Fry and Paul Nash – but he also bought to the table his own vision. In particular his series of First World War pictures, drawn in and very soon after leaving the trenches are a real discovery and enrich the artistic legacy of the war. As the book which accompanies the exhibition points out, where Paul Nash focussed on the landscapes of war, and Nevinson on the mechanisation of battle, Lee’s vision homes-in on the fighting man; cowering; shooting; dying; seemingly tumbling into an alien landscape. I have included pictures of a few of the most notable pieces – but there are plenty more at the exhibition. Lee experimented with many styles and many mediums during the course of his life; he was not a slave to any particular school.

This rich artistic legacy is made still more vivid by the personal story behind the pictures. The book that accompanies the exhibition is Rupert Lee: Painter, Sculptor and Printmaker by Denys J. Wilcox and it is available from the exhibition itself and from Amazon. Together with wonderful illustrations, the book tells a remarkable personal history. I will not spoil it for those who wish to dig deeper, but Denys Wilcox has bought to life a previously lost narrative of love, vision, resentment and complexity that would be quite at home in the annals of Bloomsbury. Behind Lee’s artistic output sits his profound friendship with Paul Nash, torn asunder by personal dramas; his bizarre and disastrous marriage to a woman who appeared to be consumed by hatred for him; and his long term relationship with another woman – whose sure-footed intelligence, kindliness and tolerance make her seem so very out of step with her own times. For those who like a bit of biography with their art, there is plenty to be getting on with here.

The exhibition has also been featured in the Independent and runs until 8 May.

Indignant confusion and the Paris Lido: the strange legacy of the Marchesa Casati

Yesterday was spent exactly as I always dreamed Saturdays in France would be spent. Beloved husband attended a statistics class while I sat in a cafe in Fontainebleau sipping tea and reading. In the evening we put down our books and headed for Paris and for a table under the glittering lights and before the leggy, feathered show boys and girls of the Lido caberet. And if that sounds decadent – that is before I have even let on what I was reading. The book that I devoured in the cafe yesterday was an example of my chief vice – it was an art book. They cost too much, they are full of pictures and they certainly do not fit in your handbag – and yet I find them compulsive.

“The Marchesa Casati: Portraits of a Muse” by Scot D Ryersson and Michael Orlando Yaccarino is quite a thing to find compulsive. It is the story in words, pictures, fabrics and collages of one of the strangest, most narcissistic, most creative and downright outrageous women known to history – Luisa, the Marchesa Casati. Luisa (which I shall take the liberty of calling her) was born in late 19th century Milan and at 13 was Italy’s wealthiest heiress. She made a consensual but loveless arranged marriage early and had a child. But the world of respectable wife and mother was not one that she would inhabit for long.

Almost overnight Luisa transformed herself into a man eating, drug taking international muse. She said that she wanted to become a work of art and to this end her image was her only real focus. Any artist who came within kissing distance was commissioned to represent her appearance – she was painted on canvas, captured on film, sculpted in clay and cast in bronze. She accentuated her emaciated 6 feet tall figure with elaborate headpiece and sky high heels. In an age where some still considered piano legs to be risqué she attended parties wearing nothing but a fur cape and high heels. Her look was completed with a menagerie of exotic animals - monkeys, panthers and snakes which would be worn live and venomous around her white neck.

Such was her self-absorption that she dissipated her entire fortune on costumes, parties, paintings and the furnishing of gin palace homes. By the 1940s she was living in a bed-sit in London kohling her famous eyes with cherry blossom boot polish. There she died in 1957. Before her death she had taken to wearing a waste paper basket sheathed in black velvet on her head. She had even been seen foraging in a Mayfair bin. The cultural legacy associated with her image is colossal. In our own time it has been represented by Tennessee Williams, Cecil Beaton, John Galliano, Karl Lagerfeld and Tom Ford to name but a few.

For me, Luisa is a most confusing figure. One side of me is frustrated that a woman so narcissistic, so intellectually insubstantial could ever become a figure of cultural resonance and in anyway represent her sex. Equally, one has to admire the sheer subversion of Luisa Casati – she was not willing to do one single thing that society demanded of her and she pursued all that was not allowed and disapproved of. The urge to disobey exists in us all, but Luisa was brave enough to respond to it. At the same time, she became a figure of fun and her life, at its end, was a profoundly sad one. The authors of this pictorial biography are quite right though, when they write that her cultural legacy is so huge that we hardly even notice it anymore. This was the thought that struck me as the lights in the Paris lido dimmed and out strutted a troupe of men and women, scantily clad, gold heeled, heavily made up and topped with crowns and feathers. The image which the Marchesa Casati invented in the early part of the twentieth century, is still with us today.