British Council − UK at the Venice Biennale

On 21st August 1930, after meeting his mother and sister, Christopher Wood walked to Platform 2 of Salisbury station, and, according to a boy from whom he had just bought a book, 'sort of ran and jumped and dived and screamed' under an incoming train. Eight years later, his paintings hung in the British Pavilion alongside the most innovative of his contemporaries.

'Kit' was born to Doctor Lucius Wood, and his wife Clara, not far from Liverpool in 1901. He was sent to Marlborough College, where, in 1915, he contracted septicaemia. During the three years he was confined to bed, he developed the limp he would later carry as a dandyish trademark, a powerful closeness to his mother, and an interest in drawing.

On his recovery in 1918, he went to Malvern College, before spending a year (1919-20) studying architecture at Liverpool University, where Augustus John encouraged him to dedicate himself to painting. Moving to London's Bayswater, Wood served as an apprentice to a fruit importer, painting and working London's social circuit by night. This led to a friendship with Alphonse Kahn, an older, richer and more homosexual art collector and patron, and 'one of the best-connected men in the whole of the Paris art world' according to Richard Ingleby.

An invitation to Paris followed swiftly, and Wood swapped his bookshelves for his landlady's sea chest. On arrival in March 1921, he continued to write intense, revealing letters to his mother; blending descriptions of his new life with entirely related requests for money. Of his new host, one enthused 'he is going to introduce me to all the artists of note here, so I am absolutely in the heights of heaven. I honestly believe I was born under a lucky star.'

The letters – probably wisely – excluded mention of Antonio de Gandarillas, who Ingelby called 'in many ways the most important [person] in his life […] yet one of the hardest to gauge.' A Chilean Diplomat, Gandarillas served a similar function to Kahn, extending Wood's social circle, enrolling him in art schools, building him a studio in London, and introducing him to opium.

Eric Newton describes Wood around this time as 'a youth eager to see, taste, and learn as much as possible in as short a time as possible; and yet never content merely to absorb experience'. His life was now a heady mixture of 'wander' and 'work'. By June, 1922, he had written

Dearest Mother, you ask me what I am going to be: I have decided to try and be the greatest painter that has ever lived. In fact I want to paint everything which touches the human being. You were quite correct when you say I have a lot of work before me.

Combined with his charm and good looks, this drive allowed him to develop into a prominent figure on Parisian social circuit. His artistic development ran alongside; on meeting Picasso, in 1923, Wood gushed 'he is the greatest painter of the day. I admire his work immensely more than anyone else's. The more I learn, the more I see in it.' By 1924 Wood had also got to know Jean Cocteau 'intimately', writing that 'he is not only the greatest poet alive, but, I suppose, the greatest genius […] he and Picasso […] have created the modern art of this century.' Picasso's encouragement on seeing his work in 1926 was, unsurprisingly, hugely motivational. 

According to William Mason, magazines like Vogue and Tatler had already recognised Wood as a 'bright young person', but around 1926, his reputation got some 'bright young artist' backbone, as Colour and Drawing and Design printed his drawings and paintings, and the Redfern Gallery gave him his first exhibition alongside Paul Nash. That year, Wood became a member of the London Group and the Seven & Five Society, and in 1927 he showed at London's Beaux Arts Gallery alongside his friends Winifred and Ben Nicholson, and the potter William Staite Murray. Peter Spencer Churchill wrote that

the dry winds of the continent have blown away from his canvases some traces of the fog which besets these islands. They have left a clean colour, and gay humour which is essentially English.

Mason notes contemporaries began to notice his 'strong sense of colour', and its difference to his influences; 'whereas painters such as Picasso used colours to intensify a vision […] Wood's use of colour was not to intensify what he saw but rather to represent it as a living object.'

As early as 1922, Wood had settled on his 'explanation of modern painting'.  As he wrote to his mother,

all the greatest modern painters who we may not quite understand through their pictures, are not trying to paint them through the eyes and experience of a man of forty or fifty or whatever they may be, but rather through the eyes of the small child who sees nothing except those things which would strike him as being the most important. To the childish drawing they add the beauty and refinement of their own experience.

In 1928, he and Ben Nicholson 'discovered' ex-fisherman Alfred Wallis, 'naive' painter of Cornish seascapes in house paint, and arranger of perspective in terms of the importance of the object, rather than its distance from the viewer. Two years earlier, Wood had painted the Wallis-like China Dogs in a St Ives Window, which hung in the Nicholson's home for 20 years afterwards, but Ingleby suggests the meeting let Wood 'develop […] the necessary degree of refinement and experience to make sense of his original vision'.

Wood found St Ives immensely inspiring, writing in 1928 'I seem to live on the edge of the world. But what a world it is, I love this place and could stay here for ever if I had those around me for whom I care.' Here, he was able to produce Porthmeor Beach (1928), 'one of his first fully individual works', according to Margaret Garlake, and decide 'I feel things are becoming really vital and the studentship has passed. My work is becoming personal and sure and unlike anybody else's'. Eric Newton reckoned that, now, 'his pictures were instantly recognisable though not instantly saleable'.

Back in June 1922, he had written a kind of mantra; 'Live for the present, not much for the future, and think you are going to live for ever, then you may be happy.' By 1930, he'd abandoned the second half, and was talking to Winifred Nicholson of 'this last and most beautiful spring I shall ever see.' As his opium dependency deepened, and pushed him further into debt and paranoia, what Anthony Powell called his 'convenient bisexuality' became less convenient. His plans to marry Meraud Guinness had been blocked by her parents in 1927, and, by 1929, he was jealously in love with a married woman, Frosca Munster. According to Ingleby, in 1929, he had told Frosca that not smoking opium 'brought him closer to her 'and all the living things of the earth''. The next year he was smoking the dregs of old pipes and taking it orally; by the summer, he was dead. A Memorial Exhibition was held at Reid-Lefevre Galleries, London in April 1932.

The 1938 Biennale presented Wood alongside figures such as Jacob Epstein, Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash. In including works like Zebra and Parachute (1930) – probably his last, and possibly 'an acknowledgement of Modernism and a nod to the future and the road not taken' according to Ingleby – the show established the modern view of what Garlake called Wood's 'essential if limited role in establishing links between modernity, landscape, and concepts of the 'primitive'.'

Tom Overton, 2009.

Sources

André Cariou and Michael Tooby, Christopher Wood: A Painter Between Two Cornwalls, with essays by Françoise Steel-Coquet (London: Tate, 1997).

Margaret Garlake, 'Wood, (John) Christopher [Kit] (1901–1930),' in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004), <http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.ulrls.lon.ac.uk:80/view/article/41124>, accessed 6th October, 2008.

Richard Ingelby, Christopher Wood: An English Painter (London: Alison & Busby, 1995).

William Mason, 'Introduction', and Winnifred Nicholson, 'Foreword', in Christopher Wood (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979).

Eric Newton, 'His Life and Work', Christopher Wood 1901-1930 (London: Redfern Gallery, 1938 ).