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And I must borrow every changing shape
To find expression ... dance, dance ...
T. S. Eliot1
Il ne faut pas apprendre à dessiner.
One must not learn how to draw.
Pablo Picasso2
In The Image of the Poet: British Poets and their Portraits, David Piper laments the "decay" of portraiture "through the first half of the twentieth century, when almost all artists of any originality were uninterested in it, pursuing rather Roger Fry's formal values in painting to the brink of abstraction and beyond." He goes on:
T. S. Eliot is a case in point. There is little of him other than photographs. Wyndham Lewis's portrait of 1938, though odd enough at the time to cause its rejection by the Academy . . . seems now very conventional, inexpressive in characterization, though a tantali/.ing encapsulation ofpublisher/cntic/poet in the armour uniform of invisible ordinary man. In context with Wyndham Lewis's work it is more informative about that than it is, in context with Eliot's work, about his poetry . . . Eliot, advocate of "extinction of personality," was famous for his rejection of the picturesque poet's garb. Sober-suited.3
My curiosity was piqued by Piper's comments about the ducay of portraiture and modem artists' disinterest in it. I thought of Picasso's cubist, abstract, neo-classical, surreal, and expressionist experiments in the art of portraiture, Giacometti's sculptural portraits with their strange formal distortions, or Francis Bacons kinetic, deforming faces and figures?4
And what of Pipers claim about the conspicuous absence of other portraits of Eliot? I recalled Theresa Garrett Eliot's pen-sketch of Eliot's face in three-quarter view, made in the 1920s, Wyndham Lewis's numerous pencil, charcoal, ink-and-wash exploratory sketches of him, and Charlotte Eliot Smith's enchanting oil painting (c. 1900) of a twelve-year-old Eliot sitting on a chair, in sculptural side profile, reading a red volume of Shakespeare.5
My interest was further stirred by Pipers invocation of that critical albatross of the twentieth century, Eliot's notion of the "extinction of personality." Yet one recalls a famous photograph of Eliot (with Lady Ottoline Morrell), standing by a grand fireplace, slickly coiffured and white flannel trousered, a Prufrockian figure, with his selfconsciously fashionable dandyism (LOTSE, Fig. 27). (Eliot once wrote to Conrad Aiken to ask him to retrieve a valise...