Joyce Cary on Gerald
Wilde
(excerpt from the ICA exhibition of Gerald Wilde's work,
1955)
Gerald Wilde, Fata Morgana
(Green Seascapes) Oil on Board, 1949, (Tate Gallery Collection)
The first time I met, Gerald Wilde was, I think, about 1949, in Oxford, at the Davins'. It was late in the evening. There was a crowd of people in the room, Ronnie Syme, the historian, was one and I think Louis MacNelce was another. certainly I know I was sitting by the fire conversing on some historical matter with Father Gervase Matthews, when I heard a queer noise and saw in the middle of the room a figure strange even in that gathering place of poets and professors; of dreamers in all dimensions.
At first glance, in the dim light, Wilde seemed like a spectre. His long, dead?white face with its hollow cheeks was like the mask of bleached skin on a skull, his arms seemed but bones, hanging loosely in the sleeves of an enormous coat whose crumpled folds gave no room for flesh. The arms, too, were extremely long, so that the bony hands almost touched the floor. It was as if this skeleton had but half risen from the grave ... Wilde was a painter who thought of himself as a Gully Jimson* in the world, and seeing me unexpectedly, he wanted to explain all at once, his feelings about the books, about Gully, about the relations of artist and public. Since then, he has talked to me on all these matters with the detached tentative air rather of polite conversation than obsession….
I have often thought how true to the fact was that first apparition to me of Gerald Wilie in the Davins' sitting?room; he seemed like a revenant from another world of spirits, and so he was. He came to us out of a dream that he could not even describe or explain, he could only paint it. For such a world, that realm where the original visual artist lives as naturally as we In our familiar conventions, is so alien to that of the judgment, of the critical reason, that judgment and reason themselves are barriers about it.A painter like Wilde Is born to his own visionary dimensions and it is one necessarily so alien to his contemporaries, that it is equally hard for them to conceive It, or for him to describe it….
You cannot classify Wilde's art. It is not representative; and neither is it abstract. It conveys the most powerful impressions by means of form and colour of which the relation is not so much to an actual world of objects as to the real world of a fundamental and universal experience. I cannot explain what I feel before the grand and strange complex of Wilde's Rocky Landscape, of his Green Seascape, of the landscape that he never named, that I call the Woman on the Shore, or his Creature. But for me they belong emphatically to the category of great art. And they are profoundly original.
* Gully Jimson is the hero of Joyce Cary's novel, The Horse's Mouth (1944).
© Joyce Cary