Christopher “Kit”
Wood. Left Liverpool at the age of 19 and proclaimed that he would
become the greatest painter the world had ever seen. He had £14 in
his pocket.
He was born in Huyton, then in the countryside near Liverpool.
He was sent to boarding
school in Malvern at an early age.
He had been interested
in medicine and architecture at Liverpool University where he met the painter Augustus John who was then teaching there.
He arrived in Paris in
March 1921 at the invitation of the collector Alphonse Kahn.
There he studied at the
Academie Julian where he met many of the worlds soon to be famous
painters.
He was bisexual.
Paris was the modern
city and the capital of art.
Rules had been broken
and the intellectual way of painting had arrived decades earlier.
'Kit' got some bad habits, such as Opium which may have been introduced to
him by his rich Playboy lover, Antonio de Gandarillas
His addiction would greatly hinder him.
“My brain is working
too hard, he said, and I don't know where the end will come, I work
so hard and produce nothing whatsoever to satisfy me”
In Feb 1927 none other
than Picasso recommended that Kit design the set for Serg Dagliev's
Romeo and Juliet at Theatre Du Chatelet.
It was a disaster. As
Dagliev had a blazing row with him and he was sacked.
In
1927 his plans to elope and marry heiress Meraud Guinness were
frustrated by her parents whereupon he required emotional support
from Winifred Nicholson.
Despondent but with
fresh ideas swimming around in his head he headed for Cornwall. His
mother was Cornish.
In the summer of 1928 Kit joined Ben Nicholson
on Sunday 26th August for a sketching trip to St Ives.
He
had high hopes on the English Riviera.
They headed for Porthmeor
beach and painted.
After a successful day spent painting they packed up and set
for home
Then something happened
that would change both their lives
There in a small cottage with an
open door they both peered in and in a room full of paintings.
They had discovered the work of Alfred Wallis.
The naivety was an inspiration
and Kit stayed on for the autumn, renting a place closed to Wallis.
Nicholson went back to London to spread the word of the
encounter as if the Messiah had arrived.
“If I am here long enough, he said I am going to paint
good things”. Kit said.
He began to paint
scenes inspired by the Cornish Coast with its fresh light.
Had he finally found
the inspiration he desired. Cocteau who said he was an exceptional
painter, now meant nothing to him.
He started painting
inspired by Wallis who he visited every day, but the hallucinogenic
addiction that he had to Opium was preying on him.
He became paranoid and
began to lose his mind painting some sinister scenes in what would be
some of his last works.
Wallis opened up a
spirit in him and his work was beginning to bear fruit.
He felt as if
he belonged to the light of the coast of St Ives.
Wallis became a cult
recording the decline of the fishing industry in his own silly way
that seems to have conjured up dreamlike sequences for aspiring
artists who now flocked there. Wallis painted on anything he could
find and he was free not having had any training.
He was poor and in
1890 after chasing shoals of fish out in the deep sea. He painted from memory
and his perspective is very strange indeed, but it was this charming
naivety that the new modern artists adored.
Kits work then took on
a paranoid sense of his own gloom laden opium twisted senses.
In 1929 he held a solo
exhibition at Tooths Gallery in Bond Street.
He met Lucy Wertheim
there, she would become a supporter of his.
"I
know that my future as a painter from now on will be bound up with
your own, and I
shall become great through you!"
He would say to her.
In
May 1930 he had a largely unsuccessful exhibition with Nicholson in
Paris. In June and July he made a second trip to Brittany to create
new work.
Later in July Lucy travelled to meet Kit in Paris, to
choose the paintings for a one-man show that would be the opening
exhibition at her new Wertheim Gallery in October.
While
discussing the exhibition over lunch the day after her arrival, Wood
issued her with an ultimatum: "'I want you to promise to
guarantee me twelve hundred pounds a year from the time of my
exhibition, one hundred pounds a month being the least I can live on.
If I can't have this sum I've made up my mind to shoot myself'".
When she complained, he begged her forgiveness, and they went to
review the paintings again.
On 21st
august 1930 Kit met his mother for Lunch in Salisbury and then
through himself under a train. He was 29.
This was reported as
an accident.
Following
his death the show was cancelled; it was eventually staged as a
memorial show at a different gallery in 1931.
He was buried
in the churchyard of All Saints Church in Broad Chalke.
His
gravestone was carved by the sculptor Eric Gill.
CODA
Alfred Wallis.
An ex fisherman he
retired from the sea in 1890 and opened a marine supply store.
When his wife died in
the 1920's he began to paint.
Little did he know that his melancholy
would inspire a generation.
He was naïve alright
and poor he painted on anything he could get his hands on.
He had no idea about
perspective and his subliminal thoughts began to show through and
inspire others. He would say that he painted out of his mind as it
was.
Wallis was sent to a
madhouse as he was chased by ghosts. He died a celebrity amongst the
artists and he was entombed by Bernard Leach who erected his epitaph.
The art community came
to pay its respects.
