Walter Sickert

Very provocative, in the context of a relatively corseted English academic art, Walter Sickert painted unusual subjects such as music hall scenes, or later, de-eroticised nudes stripped of all glamour in poor Camden Town interiors. His contemporaries were struck by the artist’s choice of colours - as virtuoso as strange, inherited from training with Whistler - and disconcerting framing. From 1890, Sickert travelled more regularly to Paris and Dieppe, eventually settling in the seaside resort from 1898 to 1905. He was heavily influenced by the French art scene and became close to Edgar Degas, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Pierre Bonnard, Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro.

At the end of his career, between the two world wars, Sickert innovated by turning news photographs into paintings, a process largely taken up in the 1950s by artists. While he never crossed the threshold into abstraction, Sickert unceasingly provoked the art world and the public with his iconographic and pictorial inventions. Indeed, the legacy of his art is the lasting mark it left on the work of many artists for generations to come, notably that of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.

Curation of the Tate Britain:

• Alex Farquharson, Director, Tate Britain
• Emma Chambers, Curator, Modern British Art, Tate Britain
• Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, Curator of Drawings, Musée d'Orsay and former Curator, British Art, 1850-1915 at Tate Britain
• Thomas Kennedy, Assistant Curator, Modern British Art, Tate Britain

Curation of the Petit Palais:

• Annick Lemoine, General Curator, Director of the Petit Palais
• Delphine Lévy, Director of Paris Musées (2013-2020)
• Clara Roca, Curator in charge of 19th- and 20th-century graphic arts collections and photography at Petit Palais