Horace Brodzky

There are four letters from Horace Brodzky to Ruth Borchard, between July 1961 and July 1963, all sent from Kilburn, London NW5. The first suggests that Ruth visit him when she is next in London, doubtless to select a self-portrait. At the top of the letter, in pencil, are the words: 'Apr 63', which seems to be the actual date of the ink self-portrait bought by Ruth (in his letter of April 27^th 1963, he is willing to provide, for 12 guineas, 'a recent drawing that should be suitable and this may be seen any time'). As a P.S. To the first letter, Brodzky has written:

      Do you know my?

     1.Forty Drawings: text by James Laver

     2.Biography of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska]

     3.Biography of Jules Pascin

The further correspondence in 1963 concerns Ruth's suggestion that he should offer (as he describes it), the Gaudier-Bzeska bust of myself... to the Friends of Israeli Museums for £50.' Brodzky owned this portrait bust by the French-born sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who had been killed in the First World War in 1916, aged twenty-three. In the letter dated July 8^th, Brodzky sets out his difficult personal situation: 'Living more like a recluse and with advancing age [he was then seventy-eight years old], my finding a number of wealthy people to buy the bust for presentation to Israel, would be most difficult for me and v. unlikely. Your offer to contribute to such a fund [she had offered the sum of £20] is appreciated, but I find that my co-religionists are not very art-minded.' Over two pages in his final letter, he explains in further detail why he cannot offer the Gaudier-Brzeska bust to the Friends of Israeli Museums:

     'Since 1911 I have been connected with the London art world & have 

      exhibited at all important exhibition – & in the provinces – and have   

      worked for modern art. I have kept this bust since 1913 for personal and 

      sentimental reasons & not with the intention of selling it. Now, I've 

      decided to sell it, I hope to get a fair price, relating the price to that of 

      other modern sculpture.

      'For a long time I have sold none of mt work & have had to rely on 

      selling items by other artists that I have collected over the years & in 

      better times. Thus I decided upon the bust& my price is low compared 

      with much contemporary work.

      'This letter is not an angry complaint but just the plain facts that I thought 

      you might like to know.'

The 1963 self-portrait is, characteristically, a taut, delicate and powerful drawing of the artist, then in his seventy-eighth year – not (to adapt the words of his final letter to Ruth) an angry complainging representation of an old, poor man but 'just the plain facts', the bare, elemental self-perceived reality of himself. Like his young friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, a precocious genius of a sculptor and a draughtsman whom he befriended in London before the First World War, Brodzky had an uncanny ability to conjure up reality through a few quick, spare pen strokes. The directness and dignity of this exquisitely simple self-calligraphy straight at us (and himself) through round, wire-rimmed spectacles, are plain to see.

In his 1933 book on Gaudier-Brzeska, Brodzky illustrates an early, undated self-portrait in pen-and-ink: here, Brodzky, wearing a hat and moustachioed, has provocatively intense staring eyes. Hr was evidently, according to this portrayal, 'a live wire', with a persona conjured up through just a few terse, immaculate lines. That he remained 'a live wire' into old age is proved by his vivid, wiry late self-portrait – an image of a bemused, unebittered old man worn down very near to the bone.

In Forty Drawings by Horace Brodzky, published in 1935, James Laver revealingly described Brodzky's draughtsman's technique: 'Brodzky prefers the ordinary 'dip-in' steel nib, for this enables the hand, by varying its pressure on the paper, to broaden the line at will, or rather in obedience to the obscure subconscious or half-conscious promptings which guide the hand to its task. He makes no preliminary studies, draws no pencil outline, carefully rubbed out afterwards to give a false impression of spontaneity. There are no erasures or alterations. Each drawing is made 'au premier coup'. It is made very quickly, as a unity, and when finished the artist cannot remember at what point it was started. The drawing has been thrown on the paper, as it were, with a single gesture.'

Brodzky was born in Melbourne, Australia to Jewish parents in 1885. He studied drawing at the National Gallery of Victoria School of Art, and moved with his family to live in San Francisco in 1904, surviving the 1906 earthquake there, then spending two years in New York before returning to London in 1908. A meeting with Walter Sickert at the Allied Artists' Association in that year was of seminal importance. and thereafter he regularly attended the 'Saturday afternoons', alongside young artists such as Vanessa Bell and Mark Gertler, held by Walter Sickert in his Fitzroy Street studio; Brodzky recalled Sickert being 'very kind and considerate of young artists' there. Briefly attending the City and Guilds Art School in Kennington in 1911, Brodzky became friendly with artists like Gaudier-Bzeska, Jacob Epstein, David Bomberg, Jacob Kramer, Alfred Wolmark, Isaac Rosenberg and Gertler, and enjoyed meeting with them in Fitzrovia and at the Café Royal. The latter was, for Brodzky, a cultural stage set of glittering splendour frequented by the artistic beau monde, figures such as Sickert, Augustus John, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Nina Hamnett and Rupert Brooke, and also a place where he could obtain a nourishing meal for just half a crown. 

The art dealer Michael Parkin (1931-2014) – who in 1972 showed Brodzky's work in the exhibition 'The Café Royalists' (at the Michael Parkin Gallery, London and at the Café Royal itself), and held a Brodzky Retrospective show in 1974 – recalled the scintillating, convivial tenor of his conversations with Brodzky in the artist's latter years: 'Horace Brodzky was a true friend and had an important part in the wild, brilliant Gaudier-Breszka's short life – a patient friend and an affectionate Boswell. We often talked through the night about Gaudier and other artists like Bevan, Gore, Ginner and Gilman. Nevinson recalling for him the Slade gang with their black jerseys and scarlet mufflers, the respectable Wyndham Lewis in his tight black suit and Ezra Pound wearing trousers made of brilliant billiard table-green baize.' and Ezra Pound wearing trousers made of billiard table green baize.

In 1911, Brodzky went on a painting to Rome, Naples and Sicily, travelling with his friend John Gould Fletcher (1886-1950), a young American writer who went on to find renown as an Imagist poet and authority on modern art. In northern Italy, Brodzky became enamoured of Piero della Francesco's frescoes, which helped inspire Brodzky's own paintings of groups of people, each of whom was strongly individuated and contoured using a foreshortened perspective and a light, almost translucent palette. This led to his first exhibition in his Chelsea studio in late 1911, 'Paintings and Sketches of Italian and Sicilian Scenes'. The leading art critic P.G. Konody described Brodzky's art lying as being somewhat between that of the muralist Frank Brangwyn and the Post-Impressionists, and he selected one of these Italian scenes for the British exhibit at the 1912 Venice Biennale. In 1914, a work by Brodzky was included in the Jewish section of the Whitechapel Art Gallery's survey, Twentieth Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements, selected by David Bomberg, who was just twenty-four at the time. Horace's son, John Brodzky, reminisced in 1989, 'Where and when he could he would enjoy life. He liked good food and wine and when funds permitted, he would dine at the best restaurants. In his later years he spent much of his time alone although he was a gregarious character who always enjoyed a good discussion. He was kind and considerate and tended to promote his fellow artists rather than himself.' In 1919 he married Bertha Greenfield; they went on to have three sons.

In the years just before the First World War, Brodzky encountered the works of Piero della Francesca – self-avowedly the greatest influence on his art – whilst travelling in Italy with his friend the American poet John Gould Fletcher. Brodzky first exhibition, ‘Paintings and Sketches of Italian and Sicilian Scenes’, was held in his Chelsea studio; one of these works was selected for the British exhibit at the 1912 Venice Biennale.

He was the first artist in Britain to make linocut pictures (in 1912), and his early semi-abstract prints have a vigorous succinctness equal to that of the most avant-garde contemporary German and French woodcut and linocut prints. His prints were included in the innovative exhibition of linocuts at London's Redfern Gallery in 1929, organised by Claude Flight. His most notable early prints include a 1912 woodcut Self-Portrait, a fearsomely stoic self-image; a 1913 linocut of a bather, whose long flowing hair alongside the waves of the sea are composed in enchantingly simplified rhythms; a sensuous, abstracted view of Adam and Eve in Expulsion (1914); an uproarious Cubist linocut (c.1919) of a dancer pirouetting; a delicate, intimate image of a woman applying make-up (also 1919); and highly elaborate yet concise views of a Christian fiesta (1918) and hard-working Labourers/Builders (1919), balletic figures burdened with quotidian sorrow. Living happily in New York from 1915 until returning to London in 1923, he was active there as a painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and stage designer – he also designed book jackets for writers including Ezra Pound, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair and Eugene O'Neill, also painting a portrait of the latter – and in 1917 helped the art patron John Quinn organise a New York exhibition of Vorticist art. 

The 1920s and 30s were a period of hardship and struggle for Brodzky; his marriage to Bertha ended in 1934, partly owing to financial problems. Bertha returned to New York, raking their son David with her; their sons Arthur and John remained with Horace. For ten years he taught art two night a week at an evening school in Bermondsey. In 1933, his biography of Gaudier-Brzeska was published, and two years later James Laver's Forty Drawings by Horace Brodzky, which reveal just how fine a draughtsman he was. The Gaudier-Brzeska biography is a vivid memoir of bohemian artistic London before the First World War, with stories of the two artists smashing up a portrait of the critic John Middleton Murry with mad glee, and eating sausage and cheese sandwiches on the pavements of Soho, while screaming at the passing bourgeoisie. The book contains Gaudier-Brzeska's affectionate and masterful pen drawing of Brodzky, his big-chinned face quite outrageously compressed beneath a very high hat.

The description of Gaudier-Brzeska modelling Brodzky's portrait bust is extraordinary as a picture of Henri, one of the century's greatest (and ultimately most tragic artists) at work:

          He was full of enthusiasm, and insisted upon my stripping to the waist, 

          as he wanted to do the chest as well. My head was tilted back, with

          the chin prominently forward. He worked in a most alarming fashion: 

          jabbeing all the time. He did not appear to go at it methodically... but

          he thumped the clay about, gouged out furrows, and all the time he was 

          telling me amusing stories. This bust, to use his own words was 

          'cubic', and in many respects is very much like his over-life-size pastel 

          portrait of myself. In each of these works, bust and pastel, he has

          emphasised the planes and exaggerated the asymmetrical in my head. 

          Both, I think, are good character portraits and interesting examples of

          his work. The modelled portrait of myself, I consider his most 

          interesting portrait bust.

In 1937 Brodzky shared an exhibition with David Bomberg and the Austrian refugee artist Margarete Berger-Hamerschlag at the Foyle Gallery. From 1948 to 1962 he earned a small but regular income as art editor of the Antique Dealer and Collector’s Guide, a magazine founded by his brother Vivian. Though he complained (in a 1963 letter to Ruth) of total neglect by the Ben Uri Art Society in London (which exhibited works by leading Anglo-Jewish artists), Brodzky was accorded an eightieth-birthday exhibition by them in 1965. Ruth kept a cutting from The Jewish Quarterly (Winter 1965/6), 'I Remember, by Horace Brodzky' (printed to coincide with his Ben Uri Retrospective), in which he praised the disinterested kindness (all misspelt names corrected here) of 'the art critics around 1910-14 – Frank Rutter of the Sunday Times, P.G. Konody of the Daily Mail, and Louis Hind of the Observer. Others who I do not forget were E. McKnight Kauffer [1890-1954; the American-born modernist artist and – from around the time he came to London from Paris at the start of the First World War (living in London for the rest of his life) – brilliantly elegant graphic artist, creating over many years 140 posters for the London Underground, including notably the famous Vorticist-inspired 1915 image of birds in Flight], Jack Beddington [who, as publicity director for Shell Oil, had commissioned poster images by some of Britain's best artists, and who went on to write the 1957 Studio Publication Young Artists of Promise], A.E. Orage [editor of the New Age journal, and regarded as a first-rate literary critic by T.S. Eliot]... the artist Arthur B. Davies [1862-1928; an American whose conservative, romantic painting style was utterly transformed – at least during the years of the First World War – by the Modernist example of painters such as Matisse and Picasso; Davies was the principal organiser of the hugely influential 1913 Armory Show in New York, which first introduced European Fauvist, Cubist and Futurist artists to the American public] and Alfred Stieglitz [1864-1956; the pioneer American photographer, promoter of Modernist art and avant-garde gallerist] of New York. In New York Jules Pascin [1885-1930; the Bulgarian-born painter, educated at art schools in Vienna and Munich, who settled in Paris in 1905, living in New York from 1914-20, then returning to live in Paris, where he became celebrated for his gauzy erotic oils of female nudes, their soft focus often adumbrated by a contoured charcoal armature] was a good friend and critic of my work.' Pascin and Brodzky spent a good deal of time wandering round artistic Greenwich Village, and drawing together; Pascin became a conduit through which Brodzky discovered the qualities of School of Paris artists of diverse nationalities but of Jewish roots, notably Modigliani, Chagall, Soutine and Kisling. In 1946 Brodzky own study of Pascin's art was published.

He went on to say:

         I have lived all my life in Bohemia, or on the fringe of it. It has been 

         said that 'Bohemia exists only in retrospect', but this is not true. When  

         one is young and has apparent endless vitality, one can live precariously 

         and savour the sweet and fleeting moment. This state of mind can be 

         can be carried over to later years, even though the pace slackens.

         When I came to London (from New York) in 1910, there were a group 

         of Jewish artists, each with a very personal flavour – Bomberg, Isaac

         Rosenberg (who was also a fine poet), Gertler, Kramer, Meninsky and 

         the sculptor Epstein, none of whom, regret to say, received Jewish

         patronage... all have now departed... In their several ways. They all 

         made their contribution to British art. All... were conditioned by their 

         time, places and associates, and not by their early Jewish home 

         surroundings and their religion. The very nature of this religion was a 

         deterrent.

From 1948-62 Brodzky was once again in receipt of a regular income, as designer and writer on the current London art scene (under the nom-de-plume of H. Asher) for the magazine The Antique Dealer and Collector's Guide, founded by his brother Vivian. This gave him a new lease of life as a painter. He remained, however, in his tiny top floor flat in an old house in Kilburn, with minimal furniture, heated in winter only by the kitchen stove. A 1956 oil self-portrait by Brodzky depicts him around the age of seventy-one, presumably at home, heavily moustachioed, bespectacled, wearing a white shirt and grey tie and waistcoat, holding a pipe aloft, his face portrayed straight-on (as in the self-portrayal acquired by Ruth), appearing poignantly hangdog, almost comically disconsolate in mien.  

Brodzky's later paintings – ranging from Garden Conversation (1934) to Trio (1964) – often portray groups of young women, at once monumentally and intimately rendered, in animated rapport. The re-kindling of his early interest in Piera della Francesca is evident in Trio but, as Frances Spalding has noted of later 60s figure scenes, 'Their lyricism is made still more poignant by Brodzky's anti-classical stance; he relies on a drawing style that is individual and felt and which rejects smooth perfectionism.'

A 1934 watercolour of Four Poets, depicting a group of sturdy young men apparently declaiming their work or in deep conversation about their craft, has a delicate Pascin-like palette and firm outlines; it is a fine and subtle study of collective poetic transport. Brodzky lived at various addresses in the London districts of Kilburn and Willesden for much of his life; and his 1956 painting, Kilburn Roll-call is a powerfully wrought, empathetic portrayal of eight stalwart young working men gathered in the street, gesticulating with rather wild muscular gestures as they apparently wait to be chosen for casual labour. 

A drypoint self-portrait by Brodzky, made in 1939, is included in the permanent archive of 'Five Centuries of Self-Portrait Prints', part of the Charles and Evelyn Kramer Collection donated to the Tel Aviv Museum – alongside self-portraits by, amongst others, Goya, Beckmann, Giacometti, Chagall, Hockney, Klee, Matisse, Munch, Picasso, Rembrandt and Van Dyck.