English painting between roughly 1905 and 1935 was an odd and rather fenced-off area, difficult to explain to an outsider. The reputations which floated up in those years tend to look second- or third-rate today, and some have faded altogether; Augustus John, for instance, seemed a giant to many of his contemporaries, yet his fame has shrunk woefully. Wyndham Lewis's Vorticist movement looks flat beer compared with the foaming wine of Italian Futurism.
Why is this, I wonder? All sorts of explanations can be advanced, but perhaps there is no single, satisfactory one. It may be that the Victorian and Edwardian epochs had induced a mood of indolent, insular self-satisfaction which militated against any radical rethinking; it may be that art teaching was over-conservative (though in certain cases it was not); it may be that critical and aesthetic perspectives had got rather cockeyed and blurry; or it may simply be that the visual arts in Britain had hit a bad patch.
At any rate, while the Modernist movement was moving mountains in France, Germany and Italy, England remained in a trough out of which it did not really emerge until Nicholson, Hepworth, Ivon Hitchens and a few others brought it back into a European context.
The subject of this biography was a white hope of the first third of the 20th century, who never quite lived up to his own expectations or those of others. Gertler had a hard and uphill fight to achieve the degree of success which came his way, though almost from the start he found patrons and friends.
He was born in Spitalfields. London in 1891, the child of poor Polish Jews from Galicia, then part of the Austrian Empire. His father failed to make a living as a furrier and took the family - there were four other children - back to Poland, where in turn he failed as an innkeeper. Finally he brought them back to London, where young Max (as he was originally named) went to art classes but, to earn a living, was apprenticed to a commercial stained-glass firm. It was hackwork, and Gertler hated it.
A fellow Jew, William Rothenstein, helped to get the Jewish Educational Aid Society finance Gertler's studies at the Slade. He proved a gifted student, winning a scholarship and several prizes, and he also became friendly with Stanley Spencer, Christopher Nevinson and Paul Nash among others. Gertler seems to have had genuine social gifts as well, but was subject to fits of deep depression; almost a dual personality, at times he was the life of the party, at others a morose outsider. He was always painfully aware of his slum origins and self-conscious about his small, meagre body, which he refused to expose even on the beach among friends.
The writer Gilbert Cannan took him under his wing, and through Cannan he met D.H. Lawrence and Frieda, Katherine Mansfield and Lytton Strachey. Even more advantageously, he was taken up by Lady Ottoline Morrell and was a regular guest at her prestige gatherings at Garsington, where she helped to sell his pictures and to launch him socially. There was a traumatic relationship with the femme fatale, Dora Carrington, who had also studied at the Slade and specialised in a kind of sexual-intellectual flirtation with artists and writers. After a few tentative attempts at sex together, Carrington backed off and instead became virtually the household slave of Lytton Strachey, whose tendencies were bisexual; as is well known, she shot herself after his death.
Gertler, after one broken engagement, married a girl called Marjorie Hodgkinson, by whom he had a son, Luke, who became tubercular like his father.
As a painter, he had begun in a traditional style, and moved through a quasi-primitive manner not unlike Stanley Spencer's, then later abandoned that for rather Renoiresque pictures of female nudes and busty women in interiors. But easily his best-known painting is The Merry-Go-Round of 1916, a slightly Futurist-style canvas which turns up almost inevitably in textbooks of English art and was meant as a satire on war - the Flanders trenches were already eating up Europe's young manhood, though Gertler himself did not serve in the army. I find it a meretricious piece myself, but it is unsafe to say so in English art circles.
Gertler found married life rather a chore, yet was emotionally stricken when his wife, on a visit to Paris, met an Austrian refugee and went to live with (and eventually marry) him. During the 1930s his naturally depressive temperament had begun to sag under a combination of hostile factors - marital break-up, the rise of Hitler and virulent anti- Semitism in Europe, his son's ill-health (though Luke recovered after a long spell at Davos), money worries, sharply falling sales for his paintings, and the threat that Westminster Art School, where he taught, would close down if war came ( it did, in fact, and never reopened). Perhaps, too, he sensed that his path as an artist was now irrevocably downwards; at any rate, he gassed himself in his London studio on June 13th, 1939. Some of his friends, including Lady Glenavy and the Russian translator, Koteliansky, blamed his wife and never forgave her for deserting him.
Sarah MacDougall has immersed herself in the cultural life of England between the wars, and there are many distinguished walk-on parts, including Virginia Woolf and most of Bloomsbury, as well as Lawrence and his set, the Sitwells, et alii. Gertler himself, however, is ultimately of limited interest either as an artist or a man - there is no English Soutine in the making here, nor an English Chagall.
The colour reproductions seem good, and the period photographs add a spice of interest; but nevertheless we are unlikely to see Gertler's reputation rocket upwards in the near future. Instead of writing a new chapter in British art, he ended up as little more than a footnote to it.
Mark Gertler. By Sarah MacDougall. John Murray, 398 pp. £25 sterling