Mark Gertler

Book excerpt: This is the first biography of Gertler to be published for thirty years. It reappraises an extraordinary artist, a figure who fascinated his contemporaries. His is for instance the sinister sculptor of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, the dashing Byronic hero of Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow, and the egotistical writer of Katherine Mansfield's story Je ne parle pas francais. Gertler achieved recognition early, and was admired and encouraged by Walter Sickert, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Henry Moore. He was championed by the flamboyant Lady Ottoline Morrell, and his magnificent, haunting pictures were keenly collected. Yet despite his apparent ease in London society, he himself felt his Jewishness and working-class background to be insuperable barriers, and his artistic ambition gradually alienated him even from the people among whom he'd grown up. He found no happiness and at the age of 47 he committed suicide. A few weeks earlier he had had dinner with Virginia Woolf and had impressed her with his 'fanatical devotion to his art'. On hearing of his death she recorded in her diary that he had been 'perhaps too rigid, too self-centred, too honest and too narrow ... to be content or happy. But with his intellect and interest,' she asked, 'why did the personal life become too painful? That is one of the questions Sarah MacDougall explores in her life of this complex man, whose powerful images, like the Merry-go-round or the Creation of Eve, have lost none of their disturbing eloquence.