Content area
Full text
Lawrence's Paintings D. H. Lawrence's Paintings. Introduction, Keith Sagar. London: Chaucer Press, 2003. 160 pp. £25.00
THIS RECENT edition of D. H. Lawrence's paintings resists simple categorization. An oversized and heavy volume, it looks like a coffee-table book with its large print, glossy pages, and colorful reproductions, but I suspect that it will be lugged to class by many teachers of Lawrence who are eager to introduce their students to this lesser-known aspect of the writer's creativity. With its lengthy introduction by noted Lawrence specialist Keith Sagar, the book functions somewhat as a scholarly text, yet it is devoid of such scholarly apparatuses as footnotes and a complete literature review. Something of a hybrid, D. H. Lawrence's Paintings is nonetheless appealing for being a "mixed marriage" of genres (to appropriate one of Lawrence's own working titles for his novel The Lost Girl), even if occasionally frustrating for the very same reason as well.
Until this century, Lawrence scholars and aficionados had access to only a small portion of Lawrence's work in oils and watercolors: the Mandrake Press edition of 1929, now hard to find, which reproduced the paintings exhibited in the Warren Gallery that year (twenty-five paintings in all, fifteen in oil and ten in watercolor); Mervyn Levy's reproductions of forty-seven art works in Paintings of D. H. Lawrence, published in 1964; and a critical study by Robert Millett in 1983 that included sixteen of the Mandrake Press's reproductions. Of these, the Levy volume has been the go-to publication for those interested in Lawrence's visual art. Many of its reproductions are in black and white, however, and thus are at a far remove from the originals; and even the color reproductions are fairly lackluster.
In contrast, Lawrence's first biographer, Harry T. Moore, who saw the Warren Gallery exhibition paintings in 1932 in France, said that they "blazed." I saw that quality for myself in 1998 when, along with scores of other Lawrence enthusiasts from around the world, I viewed the ten Lawrence originals owned by Saki Karavas and displayed in his hotel in Taos, New Mexico (site of the eighth international D. H. Lawrence conference). Our sense of the paintings dulled by long exposure to the Levy volume, we were astounded by their vibrancy. These...