TIMES SQUARE/Brendan Glacken: There is a new book out about Mark Gertler, admirably entitled Mark Gertler (John Murray, £25). Written by Sarah MacDougall, it is a biography of the early British modernist artist now almost forgotten except for his masterpiece, The Merry-Go-Round, which he painted in 1916 at the age of 25. The poor lad's life and work went downhill all the way after that, and he finally gassed himself in 1939.
Naturally (enough), the author and the reviewers of the book have been asking what went wrong with Gertler, apart from his having tuberculosis, constant money worries, a depressive temperament, recurrent migraine, incipient melancholia and a disastrous love affair with the will-I-won't-I-sure-maybe-I'll-think-about-it Dora Carrington.
There are also hints that Gertler wasn't altogether happy with the hectic social life into which he desperately threw himself at Garsington, the famed Bloomsbury salon of the weird, horse-faced, necrotising Ottoline Morrell, attended by the likes of Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and many others.
It may be that Gertler's depression stemmed from an incident in the grounds of Garsington one sunny Friday afternoon in June 1921.
While most of the day's guests were tucking into a light theosophical lunch of radishes, corned beef, stewed rhubarb and elderberry wine, Gertler, a tennis player of some skill (and, it must be said, vanity) was setting up a game of doubles in which he and Virginia took on the Bells (husband and wife).
Unbeknownst to Gertler, however, Vanessa Bell (Ginnie's sister) had been preparing for just such an encounter, dutifully practising her ferocious backhand drive at Garsington each evening while other guests were diving into the pre-dinner drinks.
Vanessa unleashed this powerful backhand as soon as the game started, with the result that Gertler and Woolf were soundly beaten by the Bells, six games to two, in what subsequently passed into literary lore as the Bloomsbury Set.
Gertler himself smashed his racquet in anger and walked off court. Having changed, he joined the post-lunch literary session, where he proceeded to lecture the assembled guests for two hours on - rather unnecessarily - the evils of sobriety, until Ottoline Morrell called a halt: "Mark", she trilled, "in this salon you may be amusing or you may be gay, but you cannot be serious".
Gertler then drank himself into a stupor, but Garsington being that kind of place, nobody took any notice.
One of the reviewers of the Gertler biography has suggested that the artist's basic trouble was "that he suffered one of the cruellest of fates: to possess a great talent that slowly disappears".
This bears thinking about. But it does not stand up, not in terms of such a problem being one of the cruellest of fates.
Far worse is to possess a tiny talent that gradually grows. This was the hideous fate which befell the Irish modernist artist, Paud Beag O'Hara.
At the age of 50, O'Hara could not tell one end of a paintbrush from the other. His only connection with the world of painting was the gable wall of his Crossmolina cottage, on which he slapped a couple of coats of whitewash in September of each year.
Then one day everything changed for Paud. At a loose end in his cottage, he picked up his paintbrush. Something urged him to set up an easel, and he did so. Then he took down a Maurice Wilks print off his wall, turned it back to front on the easel, and got to work. His medium was whitewash mixed with chicken blood.
In no time at all he had produced a work of formal innovation and severe complexity. He was going for a tone of ironic detachment, but sure the whole thing was awash in sentimentalism, decoration and representation. He realised the thing was rubbish. He fecked it in the bin.
Still it was a start. Over the next 10 years Paud hit the heights. In no time at all he was the talk of the Modernist world. He was into cubes long before Picasso. He left Salvador Dali looking like Turner.
There was no stopping the man. In his mid-70s Paud was back to realism with a vengeance while his contemporaries were still stuck with ironic detachment. Trouble was, Paud knew his work was getting better by the year.
Being a philosophical sort (well, for a Mayoman anyway), he gradually had to face the hideous knowledge that his talent was growing rather than declining. He died at 105, driven daft to think that his best work lay beyond the grave, and that as an artist he was only as good as the work he still hadn't done.