Edmond Xavier Kapp (lots 60-71)

Oh to be silent! Oh to be a painter! Oh (in short) to be Mr. Kapp (Virginia Woolf)

Introduction
Widely remembered for his portraiture, in particular his distinctive form of character types (he did not like his work to be describe as caricature), Kapp was a highly versatile artist with an enquiring mind and a love of music. Appreciated in his lifetime also for his poetry and his evolving interest in abstraction, he aspired to write, mixed with the leading artists of the day and attracted the attention of critics and the cognoscenti. The following twelve lots from his estate capture the singularity of his artistic vision and his constant thirst for innovation.

Born in Islington, London, the son of Jewish-German parents, Kapp studied in Berlin, Paris and Cambridge, where he had his first exhibition, wrote for Granta and the Cambridge Magazine and attracted the attention of Max Beerbohm. While a 2nd Lieutenant with the Royal Sussex Regiment in the First World War, he sketched portraits of his fellow soldiers to amuse them in the trenches, including the young poet Edmund Blunden, and crossed paths with William Rothenstein at Amiens, a meeting Rothenstein recalls in his autobiography Men and Memories.

After the Armistice Kapp held his first one man exhibition at the Little Art Rooms, Adelphi, London, the catalogue introduction written by Beerbohm. Commissions followed, together with the publication of his first book: Personalities published in 1919 and reviewed by Virgina Woolf in her essay Pictures and Portraits. Prominent figures who featured in his early work included Edwin Elgar, Percy Wyndham Lewis and Richard Strauss. Later, after the War, subjects ranged from Albert Einstein (1923) to the Duke of Windsor, the future King Edward VIII (1932); of leading personalities in the arts he captured the characters of Aldous Huxley and Noël Coward.

Kapp typically rejected supplying caricatures to newspapers, preferring to choose his own subjects. But he did take on commissions, such as his series Ten Great Lawyers published in 1924 in the Law Society Journal. And his work appeared in a wide variety of periodicals, most notably Time and Tide, output that resulted in the publication of further volumes of his collected portraits, and an exhibition of his work at The Leicester Galleries, the leading contemporary gallery in London of the day.

In 1922 Kapp married Yvonne Meyer, journalist, photographer, translator and writer, now best known for her biography of Eleanor Marx. On their honeymoon the young couple visited Beerbohm in Rapallo and settled the following year in Rome where Kapp studied at Sigmund Lipinsky’s art school and under Antonio Sciortino at the British Academy. There too he met the American painter Maurice Sterne who encouraged him to paint in oil.

Kapp also developed his interest in lithography as a means to sell limited editions of his more well-known sitters. It led in 1935 to a commission for portraits of twenty-five delegates to the League of Nations in Geneva. Publication of the series brought him to the attention of Pablo Picasso, and the beginning of a close friendship between the two artists. Kapp captured Picasso’s profile in a sketch of him in his studio at 23 Rue La Boetie, Paris in 1938, purportedly the only likeness for which Picasso agreed to sit (collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum). And there are relaxed and informal photos of Picasso in bathing trunks snapped by Kapp in 1948 outside the restaurant Chez Nounou and the Hotel de la Mer in Golfe Juan when holidaying with Picasso in the South of France.

During the Second World War Kapp was an Official War Artist; after the War he worked as an Official Artist to UNESCO. He kept a studio at 2 Steeles Studios, Haverstock Hill in Hampstead, North London (lots 67 & 71) and in Beausoleil, near Monaco in the Alpes Maritimes (lot 61), and explored abstraction. String Quartet (lot 71) suggests his interest in synaesthesia and the work of Kandinsky; his playful Dragon Flight (lot 69) invokes the wit of Paul Klee, while the exploration of his medium in Abstract Composition (lot 69) is suggestive of fellow experimental artist Max Ernst.


60
EDMOND XAVIER KAPP (BRITISH 1890-1978)
PORTRAIT OF A LADY
signed Kapp lower left; dated 1958 lower right
oil on canvas
92 x 60.5cm; 36 1/4 x 23 3/4in
(unframed)