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Lord Strabolgi on
Gerald Wilde
I feel most honoured to have been invited to open this retrospective exhibition of paintings and graphic works by my old friend, Mr. Gerald Wilde. I have known him for over 20 years. In fact we were students together at Chelsea School of Art In the early 1930s. The School was then, as now, under the inspiring headmaster-ship of H.S.Williamson; Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland were on the teaching staff. It is not wholly accurate to say that we were follow students since Gerald, who is some years my senior, had passed the student stage by the time I joined the school. However, he still came to Chelsea to use the lithographic press, where he worked under Graham Sutherland. It was at Chelsea that I first saw one of his works. This was a lithograph: an abstract linear design based on clowns. I was deeply impressed. He always had a beautiful sense of lithography, but all his work, oven his oi1 paintings, was always astonishingly mature. He never seemed to go through the usual early fumbling stages like other students. Then I met Gerald. I found him charming, shy, and sensitive, and very modest about his work. Later some of us formed ourselves into a little clique. The members ware Daphne Chart, Brian Robb, Olaf Pooley, Gerald, and myself - later we were joined by Edward Wakeford. None of us had much money but Gerald had even less. Sometimes he had not enough to buy paints or canvas: then he would draw with crayons, or paint on cardboard. But whatever he did was interesting with a sense of rightness about it. In the late afternoon after the school had shut we used to visit exhibitions. Gerald was interested especially in 20th Century painting, particularly in Picasso, Paul Klee, Miro, and Max Ernst. Of English painters he admired Edward Burra the most. I remember visiting Burra's first exhibition at the Leicester Galleries with Gerald, and how fascinated he was with those strange and sinister paintings. We were all of us greatly influenced by Clive Bell's book "Art", with its theory of significant form, which became a kind of bible to us. But Gerald was interested not only in modern painting but also in life. I remember walking through old Trafalgar Square, Chelsea, (now Chelsea Square) with him one day when he stopped suddenly and pointing to some cracks in a well exclaimed: "Isn't that marvellous? What a lovely pattern; just like a Klee!" He was always having what Sir Kenneth Clark has called in a recent lecture at Oxford those "moments of vision". I am proud to say that I exhibited once with Gerald. It was I think his first exhibition: it was certainly my first, and my last! One summer our little group took the Bloomsbury Gallery. We ran the gallery ourselves. The exhibitors were:
Gerald has, I think, that rare quality genius. This takes different forms in different people. With Gaugin the flame did not begin to burn until early middle age; with Rimbaud it had burnt itself out, or had been renounced, before the 19th birthday; with others like Picasso it has burned clear and steady all their lives. With Gerald the flame has been intermittent: at some periods It has been as low as the pilot jet on a gas bracket, so that he has stopped painting altogether; at others it has burned with the brightness of acetylene. But I should rather have this than the dull flicker of some mediocre painter who paints more from habit than conviction. Gerald has genius but he has always worked within certain defined limits. But how good he is within his own limits? Sometimes it happens that this kind of work can move us more then some other that is more obviously great. If you find that you are more moved by the poetry say of Petronius, Gerard de Nerval, or Ernest Dowson then by some more famous names, then I think you will be moved by the pictures of Gerald Wilde. © David Kenworthy, Lord Strabolgi
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