Christopher Wood 1901-1930

Christopher Wood was born in Knowsley close to Liverpool on 7 April 1901. His father, Dr Lucius Wood, was a well-respected doctor on the Earl of Derby’s Knowsley Estate. His mother’s family (the Arthurs) anticipated Woods’ later artistic connection with Cornwall, having lived there for generations.

Wood had a relatively privileged upbringing. He was a lively, athletic and charming young Englishman with cricket and golf early pre-occupations at his preparatory school, Freshfield and a brief stint at Marlborough, then Malvern College. Fate struck a physical blow that thwarted any sporting ambition when he was 14 and contracted septicaemia. This left him incapacitated for 3 years with the legacy of a limp, and dull but incessant leg pain. The resourceful young Wood took to music, playing the flute, and most importantly, drawing. He went on to study architecture at Liverpool University (1919-20) but in 1920, travelled to London where he made a decision to devote his life to painting. Wood’s not inconsiderable charm and luck smiled upon the young artist as he made precisely the right sort of contacts to further his artistic ambition. The French collector Alphonse Kahn, who would never cease to encourage Wood, invited him to Paris in 1920 where he studied at Académie Julian from 1921. During the autumn he visited Pisa, Florence, Milan and Lake Garda where he met the artist Michael Sevier, who gave Wood his first set of oil paints. On his return to Paris Wood met Tony Gardarillas, a man who would introduce Wood to the artists and patrons he was most anxious to meet. Over the next few years Wood was effectively on that wonderfully English phenomena of passed centuries, a young gentleman’s grand tour, interspersed with intervals of intense work in Paris and London. Between 1921 and 1924 he visited Amsterdam, Hague, Bruge, Paris, Marseilles, Carthage, Tunis, Palermo, Sicily, Salonica, Sorrento, Syracruse, Athens, Constantinople, Vienna, Praque, Munich, Berlin, Nuremberg, Leipzig, Algiers, Capri, Palermo, Naples, Rome, Venice, Normandy, Nice, Monte Carlo, Madrid, Aix-en-Provence and Avignon to name but a few! For the remainder of his life Wood mainly hopped between Paris and London, latterly Cornwall, but was not averse to trips to Cannes, Monte Carlo and of course, as famously recorded in his works of 1929 and 1930, Treboul in Brittany.

Almost from the outset Wood was confident of his own ability and destiny as an artist, but perhaps more importantly, he had a strategy that was intent upon observing and processing all around him. As early as 1922 he wrote, “My ambition is to be a great painter, and as I am learning now, I shall stand every chance of becoming one. I am going to see everything, think hard … Wait a years and you will begin the see the results.” That said, Wood was only too aware that this ambition would require intense application and time. It was not until 1928 that he allowed himself to write, “It is a great moment in my life. I feel things are becoming really vital and my studentship has passed. My work is becoming personal and sure and unlike anybody else’s.”

In the summer of 1923 Wood first met Pablo Picasso who had the greatest influence upon his development and output from this time onward. “He is the greatest painter of the day. I admire his work immensely more than anyone else’s. The more I learn, the more I see it”. It was Picasso who taught Wood how to use colour and to whom he wished to show his latest work, although it was not until 1926 that Wood built up the courage to invite Picasso to his studio, and was elated at the encouragement that he received. Wood absorbed a series of external influences in his short lifetime; most obviously that of Seurat, van Gogh, Braque, Modigliani and Picasso. But as Eric Newton notes, he was no mere pasticheur. He would distil and assimilate the influence of these artists, emerging each time with a style that had evolved, remained distinctly his, but was empowered by the process. As early as 1925 he was painting pictures that could have been painted by no one else.

In October and November 1924 Wood was in Provence where he met Jean Cocteau, who at once took to the younger artist’s work and was later to write the foreword to his first one-man show in London. The first 6 months of 1926 were spent in Paris where Wood’s friendship with Picasso ripened and the artist, on Picasso’s recommendation, was asked by Diaghileff to design the costumes and the set for Romeo and Juliet. Wood duly complied but sadly the ballet never materialised.

Importantly for our purposes, the second half of 1926 was spent in London where Wood became a member of the London Group (1926) and the Seven and Five Society (1926-30) but most crucially he met and worked with Ben and Winifred Nicholson continuing on with the Nicholsons to Cornwall in September. It was on that first Cornish autumnal trip that Wood painted The Cove. In 1927 Wood enjoyed his first London exhibition, at the Beaux Arts Gallery (April-May 1927) , where his work was displayed along side that of the Nicholsons. Winifred was supportive in the aftermath of his failed elopement with the painter and heiress Meraud Guinness (Meraud went on to marry Chilean painter Álvaro Guevara in 1929). Wood also had a liaison with a Russian émigrée, Frosca Munster, whom he met in 1928. That same year, after a short productive period in the Passy area of Paris, Wood returned to Cornwall where, accompanied by Ben Nicholson, he chanced upon Alfred Wallis. They found Wallis employing simple house paints and cardboard donated to him by neighbours, to paint outside his cottage by Porthmeor Beach in St Ives. The influence upon Nicholson and Wood of this retired seaman and his naïvely painted recollections of the boats and seas of his youth is now a well-established part of the legend of St Ives modernism. Wallis’s  primitivism undoubtedly had an influence upon Wood’s stylistic development but his oeuvre was already quite clear in his output since 1926; The Cove being a case in point. It has been suggested, with considerable cause, that Wallis’s impact was much more profound for Nicholson.

In April 1929, Wood held a solo exhibition at Tooth's Gallery in Bond Street, London where he met Lucy Wertheim at a private view. She purchased a picture and soon became one of his biggest supporters, buying up a lot of his work. For his part Wood, clearly appreciative of the support, told Wertheim at her birthday party that: “I know that my future as a painter from now on will be bound up with your own, and I shall become great through you!”

The show at Tooth’s gave Wood the confidence he needed to put down some roots and largely cease his endless chasing around Europe. As Eric Newton writes in Christopher Wood 1901-1930, “He now knew the atmosphere in which he could do his best work – Cornwall, Dieppe, the little villages of Brittany with their wild, grey and green seas and little grey and white cliffs, their fishermen toiling among the brown boats, their women among the white houses. Perhaps it was his mother’s Cornish ancestry, or perhaps his own temperament that drew him to the sea and made the interpretation of its moods his supreme achievement".

In August 1929 Wood first visited Treboul. He returned to Paris to prepare his third exhibition, Deux Peintres Anglais, which was held at the Galerie Georges Bernheim in Paris in May 1930 in conjunction with Ben Nicholson. Between January and the opening of the Paris show Wood spent a productive sojourn in Cornwall painting intensely for his next exhibition in London at Lucy Wertheim’s new Gallery. In June and July he continued the production, painting 40 works in Treboul.

In August Wood returned to England. He met his mother, to whom he was devoted, at Salisbury on the 21^st. Later that day he was killed by a train on Salisbury station.

Posthumous exhibitions were held at the Wertheim Gallery (Feb. 1931) and the Lefevre Galleries (1932). In 1938 Wood's paintings were included in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In the same year a major exhibition was organised by the Redfern Gallery at the New Burlington Galleries, which attempted to re-unite Wood's complete works, and gave impetus to Neo-Romanticism. At the time of writing Robert Upstone is preparing a Catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work.

After his death Christopher Wood deservedly became something of a legend as a youthful genius cut off before his prime. As Eric Newton expressed in his book accompanying the Redfern Gallery’s 1938 retrospective, “Fate decreed that he should die at the age of 29, but fate allowed him to live just long enough for his work to be an outstanding event in the history of British art”.