The Guardian on a Sickert exhibition and the Ripper connection

[Chris Phillips]

This report in the Guardian of a retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain mentions what it calls Patricia Cornwell's "widely discredited" theory, and includes sceptical comments from assistant curator Thomas Kennedy and Matthew Sturgis, a biographer of Sickert:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/apr/10/walter-sickert-tate-britain-retrospective-victorian-artist

There is also what looks like a passing mention of the Ripper theory ("since disproved") in a report of the exhibition in the Daily Telegraph, but it's available to subscribers only:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/artists/music-hall-actor-turned-artist-walter-sickert/

[Chris Phillips]

The Art Newspaper has an article on the exhibition, with comments about the Ripper theory from one of the curators:

Equally, though, Chambers is having to deal with Sickert’s frequent entanglement in the web of conspiracy theories around Jack the Ripper. Sickert was dragged into it in the 1970s by hoaxer Joseph Gorman, who claimed to be his son and suggested that Sickert was the Ripper’s accomplice. The crime novelist Patricia Cornwell’s 2002 book Portrait of a Killer suggested he was the actual killer. “I’m constantly asked about this [and] there’s no evidence to suggest he was involved,” Chambers says.

“In the exhibition we want to look at his impact on British art, and the impact of French art on him. We’ve dealt with [the conspiracy theory] in the catalogue, but we won’t be dealing with it in the exhibition. That’s all about the art.”

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/04/25/tate-britain-show-probes-walter-sickerts-french-connection

[Chris Phillips]

Here's a review of the exhibition by Jonathan Jones in the Guardian. The other coverage I've seen has been dismissive of the Ripper connection, but this article is less so:

Was Walter Sickert the Victorian serial killer Jack the Ripper? This grimily realist painter has been fingered for the Whitechapel murders by Ripperologists including Patricia Cornwell. But I didn’t expect to find damning evidence in a serious survey of his work at Tate Britain. Not that they flaunt it. But when I got to the last essay in the handsome catalogue my jaw dropped.

In 1888, this actor and artist – who was born in Munich in 1860 and moved to Britain as a child – appears to have written a series of letters to the police, claiming to be the killer. He put his drawing skills to macabre use in these missives, drawing caricatures of brutal male faces, sketches of men with knives standing over women’s bodies.

It doesn’t mean he actually was the serial killer, says the startling essay by Anna Gruetzner Robins. There were a lot of such letters. But the letters with arty touches – including the use of a draughtman’s pen, even a woodcut – do really seem to be by Sickert. In 2002 Tate’s conservation department got the respected paper analyst Peter Bower to compare Sickert’s correspondence with some of the Ripper letters. His research “has conclusively shown that the paper of three letters written by Sickert in 1890 matches two Jack the Ripper letters of October 1888”.

Are you sitting comfortably? You won’t be. There is solid evidence that even if Sickert was not the killer, he may have believed or fantasised that he was. ...

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/apr/26/walter-sickert-review-serial-killer-tate-britain-london-show-women-victorian-painter

According to the A-Z article on Cornwell's book (2010 edition, p. 419) Anna Gruetzner Robins (who is apparently an acknowledged authority on Sickert) has stated this belief before, but not published the evidence. I don't know know whether anything new is included in this essay in the catalogue.

[Chris Phillips]

There's a surprising amount of discussion about the alleged Ripper connection in the coverage of this exhibition. Yesterday the Guardian published two letters - one by Simon Casimir Wilson, criticising the Tate curators for apparent unawareness that a 2005 biography of Sickert by Matthew Sturgis included "a comprehensive demolition of the whole myth, including a detailed examination of the matter of the letters and the matching paper". The other by Dr Anette Magnussen expresses concern that the murders are perhaps being "exploited for attention once more":

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/may/02/jack-the-ripper-and-the-paper-thin-case-against-walter-sickert

[Jose Oranto]

I took these photos at the Sickert exhibition, it is well worth it, a unique occasion to see 'The Camden Town Murder' and some of his 'iron frame beds'

[Chris Phillips]

I took these photos at the Sickert exhibition, well worth it, it's a unique occasion to see 'The Camden Town Murder' and some of its 'iron framed beds'

Thanks for posting those pictures. If you bought a copy of the catalogue, it would be interesting to know what you thought of the essay by Anna Gruetzner Robins that's been mentioned in the press coverage.

[Jose Oranto]

Thanks for posting those pictures. If you bought a copy of the catalogue, it would be interesting to know what you thought of the essay by Anna Gruetzner Robins that's been mentioned in the press coverage.

Thank you Chris. I was looking at it in the store, but I didn't buy it, I couldn't read the essay

[Chris Phillips]

Thank you Chris. I was looking at it in the store, but I didn't buy it, I couldn't read the essay

Thanks. Judging by what I did read, it may not have contained anything particularly new.