Practitioner Criticism: Painting

Abstract

This chapter examines D. H. Lawrence’s writings on visual art in the context of his own practice as a painter. It explores a relationship between the concepts of painting and picture-making in two sections. Part I, ‘Early Painterly Criticism’, argues that Lawrence’s development as an authoritative art critic is shaped by his intense consciousness of the class boundaries that determine access to artworks and art education. ‘Later Painterly Criticism’ then examines writing from 1925 onwards which took Paul Cézanne as the model of a de-aestheticised art, leading to the use of the non-technical term ‘life’ to assess his own paintings, when this original painterly work began in 1926 and was exhibited in 1929. The chapter concludes that Lawrence’s visual aesthetic was always entwined with the question of material access to art and its discourses in a class-based society, and thus that Lawrence was simultaneously committed to ideas of individual painterly genius and to wider democratic inclusivity in the field of visual culture.