Mark Gertler: Merry-Go-Round (1916) [1]
Keith Bowler: Spitalfields roundel in memory of Mark Gertler (1995)
I.
If you ever take a walk around Spitalfields in London's East End, you might notice a fancy series of cast iron roundels [2] designed by the local artist Keith Bowler [3] and embedded at various sites, commemorating the long history and many different peoples who have called the district home.
At the corner of Brushfield Street and Commercial Street, for example, one finds a roundel decorated with apples and pears; a nod both to the Cockney character of Spitalfields and to the old fruit and veg market.
On Brick Lane, meanwhile, there's a roundel decorated with buttons and four pairs of scissors in honour of all those - be they French Huguenots, Irish Catholics, East European Jews, or Muslims from Bangladesh - who have traded in textiles and worked in the rag trade.
Whilst, on Hanbury Street, you'll come across a roundel celebrating the matchgirls who worked in appalling conditions for outrageously low wages at the Bryant & May match factory in nearby Bow [4].
Fascinating as these roundels are, the one that really interests me, however, is located outside the house at 32, Elder Street, celebrating the life and work of Mark Gertler who lived at this address ...
II.
Mark Gertler was a British artist, of Polish Jewish heritage, born in Spitalfields, in December 1891.
He is perhaps best remembered today for a 1916 painting entitled Merry-Go-Round [5], about which his friend D. H. Lawrence - who had just received a photograph of the work - was to say this:
"My dear Gertler,
Your terrible and dreadful picture has just come. This is the first picture you have ever painted: it is the best modern picture I have seen: I think it is great, and true. But it is horrible and terrifying. I'm not sure I wouldn't be too frightened to come and look at the original.
If they tell you it is obscene, they will say truly. I belive there was something in Pompeian art, of this terrible and soul-tearing obscenity. But then, since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff. I won't say what I, as a man of words and ideas, read in the picture. But I do think that in this combination of blaze and violent mechanical rotation and complex involution, and ghastly, utterly mindless human intensity of sensational extremity, you have made a real and ultimate revelation." [6]
Lawrence continued:
"I realise how superficial your human relationships must be, what a violent maelström of destruction and horror your inner soul must be. It is true, the outer life means nothing to you, really. You are all absorbed in the violent and lurid processes of inner decomposition: the same thing that makes leaves go scarlet and copper-green at this time of year." [7]
And added as a PS:
"I am amazed how the picture exceeds anything I had expected. Tell me what people say - Epstein, for instance.
Get somebody to suggest that the picture be bought by the nation - it ought to be - I'd buy it if I had any money." [8]
It took some time, but, eventually, Gertler's Merry-Go-Round - a detail from which can be seen on Keith Bowler's roundel - was purchased for the nation; the Tate Gallery acquiring it in 1984.
And now anyone can buy a fine print of this work to hang on their wall from the Tate Shop, kidding themselves that it's simply an anti-War image, rather than a work which discloses their own coordination - and their own complicity with this coordination - within a great and perfect machine; i.e., "the first and finest state of chaos" [9].
Notes
[1] Gertler's painting was acquired by the Tate in 1984. Visit their website for more information: click here.
[2] Also known as coal hole covers, roundels are sturdy metal plates typically found on pavements in older urban areas. Originally, as the name suggests, they provided access to underground coal cellars, but they are now purely decorative and serve as historical reminders of the past.
[3] For more information on Keith Bowler and the Roundels of Spitalfields click here.
[4] Such low wages and such poor conditions in fact, that the matchgirls working at the Bryant & May famously went on strike in 1888 and formed the Union of Women Matchmakers. The largest union of women and girls in the country, it inspired many other industrial workers across the country to organise and stand up for their rights. For a post on this topic, click here.
[5] In some ways, it's a shame that Gertler has become so associated with this one picture - brilliant as it is - for it means the wider body of his work is often entirely overlooked. For the record, I think Gertler produced many fine canvases and was an interesting figure, right up until he committed suicide in his Highgate studio in 1939. I particularly like the fact that he entered a competition run by Cadbury's for a series of chocolate box designs and that his still life design of a fruit bowl was among the winning entries.
[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Mark Gertler (9 October 1916), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 660.
[7] Ibid.
It was by developing such a line of thought - one which unfortunately veers into metaphysical antisemitism ("It would take a Jew to paint this picture.") - that Lawrence (in part) created the character of Loerke, the Jewish artist who features in Women in Love (1920); although, in a letter dated 5 December 1916, Lawrence attempts to reassure Gertler that Loerke is not in fact based on him. See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 46.
[8] Ibid., p. 661.
[9] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 231.
