William Feaver on
Gerald Wilde
Wilde the unhinged
Gerald Wilde, Three Prostitutes,
Gouache on Paper, 1937, (Private Collection)
Though his obituary in the Times 18 months ago stated it as fact, Gerald Wilde wasn't Oscar's grandson. Probably not, anyway. Nor was he the original non-fictional Gully Jimson. (Joyce Cary got to know him only after having written 'The Horse's Mouth'). Nor was he the dead tramp identified as him in 1970. 'Artist Dies', the Daily Express reported. Two days later it was a different story. "I'm Feeling Very Well Says Dead Man". In life and legend, Gerald Wilde was everything a novelist or headline writer imagined and more. One-eyed, destitute, a hopeless case, he met Neo-Romantic specifications.
He was a Soho drunk in the days when being drunk in Soho was the basis of many an artistic reputation. Seeing him cadge and screech, give pictures for drinks or throw them away was perhaps to see a free spirit in action. Wilde's recklessness and derangement made him an example to others. This, they thought, was the way to be: not pushy like Dylan Thomas or blatantly sensitive, like the New Writing crowd, but almost oblivious. The paintings, prints and drawings by Gerald Wilde gathered together at the October Gallery (24 Old Gloucester St. WC1) serve both to show his limitations and confirm him as one of Soho's greatest. The upstairs-downstairs, hang 'em haphazardly, hang 'em high presentation brings out the unruliness of the work. It's Wilde more or less as I remember him, standing there in the gallery banging on about John Hoyland and Professional Abstraction.
Somewhere in the disorder are his conventional beginnings. Wilde spent seven years at Chelsea School of Art, where Graham Sutherland encouraged him. His early lithographs of dark streets and a repressive dressing table blocking the light hint at what were to become themes: the onset of panic and - through the looking glass - the loss of meaning There's a 1937 gouache of three prostitutes flouncing by, three naughty Graces on the razzle. Where they lead, Wilde follows, entering a hell-hole world of debauched spooks and guttering shadows.
During the war Wilde served for a while in the Pioneer Corps. It's possible that some experience then triggered off his composition 'The Charnel House', subsequently developed into 'The Alarm'. From this perspective it appears that they derive from the lithographs of 20 years before. They are exploded versions of 'Men with Luggage' and 'Coffee Stall'. The Blitz inspired Wilde and destroyed much of his work. The extraordinary paintings of 1946-8 may be regarded therefore as salvage.
When Joyce Cary encountered Gerald Wilde for the first time, in1949, he immediately recognised the Gully Jimson in him. 'Seeing me unexpectedly, he wanted to explain, all at once, his feelings about the books, about Gully, about the relations of artist and public'. He had, Cary added, 'the detached, tentative air rather of polite conversation than obsession. This is so in the paintings. Though infuriated, by the look of them, they are remarkably deliberately contrived. What appear to be mummified cats In 'Tomb' (1948) have distinct teeth, and the skeletal indeterminates of 'The Charnel House' and 'The Alarm' were obviously executed with more care than expressionism.
Wilde's textile designs for Ascher (London) Ltd, as worn by the Queen, were richly profuse; he could be schooled to apply himself to specific decorative tasks. Yet it is Wilde the unhinged, beating against the old imperatives, who gets the attention. In his 'Memoirs of the Forties' Julian Maclaren Ross describes how Tambimuttu, the literary figure, used poor Gerald as an editor's monkey, dragging him round the Soho, pubs to raise cash. Tarnbimuttu's 'Poetry London X' contained colour lithographs by Wilde illustrating. T. S. Eliot's 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night'. The images of puffed up predators and of a bedridden hag entertaining scrambled memories recurred in the later work, caged or dumped, enclosed in spasmodic terrain. The sky whistles towards better prospects.
In the Seventies, after periods of electric shock treatment and Jungian analysis, Wilde was encouraged to paint again. Much of the October Gallery's exhibition is taken up with drawings of capering ectomorphs and diagrammatic sketches of what the gallery identifies as a 'solar system and galactic life-tech link'. Wilde's last design, 'Out There' consists of a bundle of pierrot figures, comic cuts characters from his childhood perhaps, come to haunt the end of the pier.
© William Feaver