Mark Gertler

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Mark Gertler (December 9, 1891 – June 23, 1939), was a British portrait painter. His early life and his relationship with Dora Carrington were the inspiration for Gilbert Cannan's novel Mendel. The character Loerke from D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love and Gombauld from Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow were based on him.

Gertler was born in Spitalfields, London, the youngest child of Jewish immigrants. In 1892 he moved with his mother and siblings to his family's native city, Przemyśl, Poland while his father travelled to the United States in search of work. After his father failed to gain regular employment in America, the family returned to London in 1896.

From an early age Gertler showed signs of having a great talent for drawing. Upon leaving school in 1906, he enrolled in art classes at Regent Street Polytechnic. Unfortunately, due to his family's poverty, he was forced to drop out after a year and become an apprentice to a stained glass company. After a year in this job, he was placed third in a national art competition; this inspired him to apply for a scholarship in order to resume his studies as an artist. The application was successful. Upon the advice of the prominent Jewish artist William Rothenstein, in 1908 he enrolled at the Slade School of Art. During the four years that he spent at the Slade, Gertler was a contemporary of Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Christopher Nevinson and Stanley Spencer, among others. It was also during his time at Slade that he met the painter Dora Carrington whom he pursued for a number of years. Carrington later lived with the homosexual writer Lytton Strachey whom Gertler came to dislike.

Gertler was patronized by Lady Ottoline Morrell, through whom he became acquainted with the Bloomsbury Group. She introduced him to Walter Sickert, the nominal leader of the Camden Town Group. Gertler was soon enjoying great success as a painter of society portraits, but his temperamental manner and devotion to advancing his work according to his own vision led to increasing personal frustration and the alienation of potential sitters and buyers. As a result, he struggled frequently with poverty.

In 1914 the polymath art collector Edward Marsh became Gertler's patron. The relationship between the two men proved a difficult one, as Gertler felt that the system of patronage and the circle in which he moved was in direct conflict with his sense of self. In 1916, as World War I dragged on, Gertler ended the relationship due to his pacifism (Marsh being secretary to Winston Churchill and patron to some of the war poets).His major painting, The Merry-Go-Round, was created in the midst of the war years and was described by Lawrence as "the best modern picture I have seen" (Letters, 9th October 1916). Post-war visits to France lessened his devotion to Cezanne.

His later works developed a sometimes very harsh edge to them, influenced by his increasing ill health. In 1920 he developed tuberculosis, a disease which saw him enter sanatoria on a number of occasions during the twenties and thirties. Two of Gertler's close friends, D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield, both succumbed to the disease.

Gertler married Marjorie Hodgkinson in 1930, which resulted in the birth of a son, Luke, in 1932. The marriage was often difficult, with Gertler often suffering from the same feelings of constraint that destroyed his relationships with a number of patrons. During the 1930s he also became a part-time teacher at the Westminster School of Art in order to supplement his intermittent income from painting.

Gertler committed suicide in 1939, having attempted to do so on at least one prior occasion, following increasing difficulty selling his works, a critically derided exhibition and fear of another imminent world war.

[edit] Bibliography

• Carrington, N.(1965)Mark Gertler: Selected Letters, with an introduction by Quentin Bell, London

• Mark Gertler: The Early and the Late Years, exhibition catatalogue, London, Ben Uri Art Gallery, 1982

• MacDougall, Sarah (2002). Mark Gertler. London, John Murray, ISBN 0-7195-5799-2.

• Woodeson, John (1972). Mark Gertler: biography of a painter, 1891-1939. London, Sidgwick and Jackson. ISBN 0-283-97831-7.

• Woodeson, John (1971). Mark Gertler, 1891–1939, exhibition catalogue, Colchester, Minories