Augustus John - Celebrity Skin
Augustus John was the Hello magazine of his day - you simply hadn't arrived unless you'd been captured in oils by the Welshman. WB Yeats, James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Tallulah Bankhead, Wyndham Lewis, TE Lawrence - his list of sitters reads like a Who's Who of pre-WW2 culture. Not content with immortalising the glittering stars of the beau monde he also managed to successfully engineer his own celebrity.
He accomplished this by fulfilling other people's romantic notions of what an artist should be. With long flowing locks, outlandish moustache and gypsy earring John was 'artist' incarnate. Even his dalliances with a group of Roma gypsies in North Wales served to reinforce a particular romantic idea of artist as vagabond. This self-conscious invention of himself as 'artist' was worthy of early Madonna. In true wannabe style John craved fame and fortune like they were going out of fashion. Not for him an anonymous ascetic life dedicated to his art, garret room poverty or posthumous rediscovery - he wanted it bad and he wanted it now.
This superficial, not to say vulgar, chasing after celebrity has inevitably had a detrimental affect upon his artistic reputation and standing. Yet during his lifetime he was regarded as Britain's foremost artist and undisputed 'King of Bohemia'. It was this conflict between celebrity and ego-less artist that John could never quite resolve, and consequently he failed to live up to the 'new Michelangelo' billing bestowed upon him by tutors at the Slade School of Art. Instead he ended up stuck in the despised ghetto of portraiture, a genre long since relegated to art's second division.
However in these times of celebrity obsession Augustus John, face painter extraordinaire, may be ripe for re-evaluation. In many ways he was the natural precursor to Andy Warhol. To be silk-screened by Warhol was to become an American icon; to be painted by John meant huge snob value. Both men, acutely aware of the power of celebrity, became artistic arbiters of fame. Fittingly Warhol edited a celebrity magazine and John ended up on television.