Duncan Grant was one of the most innovative British artists of the twentieth century. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group and was an intimate and close associate of Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell. The effect on Grant and other artists of his milieu of seeing the works by Post-Impressionists in exhibitions organised by Fry at the Grafton Galleries in 1910 and 1912 was profound. Vanessa Bell wrote: ‘here was a sudden liberation and encouragement to feel for oneself which were absolutely overwhelming’ (V. Bell, Sketches in Pen and Ink: A Bloomsbury Notebook, London 1998, p.130). Grant found the paintings by Henri Matisse ‘radiantly beautiful’ and, as Frances Spalding has written, ‘Matisse helped liberate him from the tyranny of appearances’ (F. Spalding, Duncan Grant: A Biography, London 1997, p.108).
Grant had first-hand experience of contemporary developments in painting on his visits to Paris in 1913 and 1914, where he met Pablo Picasso. The following year he contributed work to the First Vorticist Exhibition at the Doré Gallery in London. During the First World War, Grant was a conscientious objector, working as a labourer on the land. His artistic output through the war years was experimental, involving abstract painting, decorative work and theatre designs, and his post-impressionist style was characterised by the use of bright, luminous colour. He developed a method of painting out of a light ground in order to maximise the brilliance of the colours, telling Fry that he wanted to ‘paint unrealistic realistic works’ and to make pictures ‘like objects’.
In his self-portrait of around 1920 Grant presents himself as slightly dishevelled with his shabby suit, crumpled collar and carelessly arranged tie. Here, in the midst of colour, there is self-searching of a sombre kind. He had found and admired a ‘coldness’ in Matisse’s paintings and while the self-portrait painting demonstrates his interest in Paul Cézanne, Picasso, André Derain and others, it is perhaps that cool detachment – despite the hot colours – that he is aiming for. Here, the painting by Matisse that he had persuaded his friend John Maynard Keynes to purchase is on the wall behind him. Only part of the painting is depicted so that its subject matter is unclear. Grant was interested in ambiguities. The different planes – the wall, the painting on the wall, the mirror itself and the picture plane – all serve to create a spatial uncertainty. Elements of decoration and pattern appear as if randomly and with no representational responsibility. The black and red stripes of his tie occur again in the reflection in the mirror’s ‘edge’ but apparently floating free of the object. This is an example of the ‘unrealistic realistic’ approach he was aiming at.
This text was first published in Facing the World: Self Portraits from Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei (2016).
