[The following edited excerpt is taken from the ninty-fifth chapter of D H Laven’s historic work-in-progress ‘The Story of Forgotten Art’. In the introduction to this pioneering work he writes: ‘There is no such thing as forgotten art. There are only forgotten artists. And a hell of a lot of them too’. In this passage he looks at the secondary artistic produce of the twentieth century painter Henry Adolphus Hunt.]
Why don’t you write something about Augustus John? Such were the words that fell like weakling lambs from the mouth of an elderly lady following a lecture I gave on the life and work of Henrietta Goosen last year at the Paul Clark Institute of Arts. Why should I do that? Here was my strident response: delivered with reassuring insolence. The lady was under the misapprehension that John qualified as a ‘forgotten artist’. On the contrary, I told her, John is not the slightest bit forgotten. And – I added – even if he were, I doubt whether I’d give him a second look. I do not bring the dead to life simply for the fun of it. Their work has to have some worth. ‘As for that hairy gypsy’ I said, ‘I cannot imagine what it is that people ever saw in him’. To my surprise the old woman concurred, finding my description both ‘apt’ and ‘memorable’. It turned out that she had once studied this rather tedious period of British Art herself, whereupon she had also come to the conclusion that John’s painting never reached the aesthetic heights scaled by his facial hair. What is more, her knowledge in this area was also to reveal that I was not the first man to call Augustus John a ‘hairy gypsy’. In 1921 an artist called Henry Hunt did the same thing to John’s face, whilst ‘chilling out’ with fellow artists in the Café Royal in London. A fight is said to have broken out, during which Wyndham Lewis’s moustache was severely damaged, along with half a dozen cream cakes. Read the rest of this entry »
