The Darker Side > Human Monsters

Jack the Ripper unmasked by Patricia Cornwell

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Loki:
Walter Sickert was, according to best-selling American multi-millionaire crime writer Patricia Cornwell, the real "Jack The Ripper". This Jack-the-Bad was the murderous mystery man who terrified foggy London town, brutally savaging ladies of the night throughout his long and bloody career.


But now the selfsame Walter's drawings and paintings fill the Ulster Museum's largest art gallery in what is regarded as one of its most powerful travelling exhibitions in many years. For as Sickert fan Alistair Smith, director of the University of Manchester's world famous Whitworth Art Gallery explained on its opening night, Walter was one of the most important English artists of his time.


Delighted to have both the Sickert show and Alistair its curator over in Belfast were the Museum's Keeper of Art Martyn Anglesea and its Acting Head of Art Elizabeth McCrum, plus Alistair's mate Ted Hickey, previously the Belfast institution's Keeper of Art. Sickert, Elizabeth explained, taught in Manchester where the noted flirt and raconteur was awarded an honorary doctorate from the university which now holds the major collection of his works.


Present to celebrate the exhibition were Henrietta Reade, Georgina Sampson and Catherine Champion, all from the National Art Collection Fund along with their friend the distinguished historian Angelique Day. Bmi cabin crew member Anne-Marie McSherry and solicitor Michael Boyle were much impressed by how the hanging traces the artist's work from drawing to finished painting. So too were sometime painter Pat Hunt, the Arts Council's Ali Bellew and consultant Peter Boyd. Fellow artists Alick Knox and Marcus Patton agreed with Sickert's saying: "Any fool can paint, but drawing is the thing".


Certainly the artist's works are moody and unsettling. Their murky narrative images of Irish music-hall entertainers and undressed women in shabby rooms are scenes many would take as more French than English. But is Cornwell's book Portrait of a Killer right about his being Jack The Ripper?


It's a nonsense, says Alistair, whose art historian friend Matthew Sturgis discredited Cornwell's research in his own acclaimed Sickert biography.

Matthew is also famous in journalist circles for an unlikely coup. While wearing his other hat as the London Independent's football correspondent he managed to promote his own book on artist Aubrey Beardsley.

The trick was to slip in a mention of Aubrey while praising the Magpies' 100 goal mid-nineties midfield striker Peter of the same surname.


The exhibition continues at the Ulster Museum until June 5

Adolph Hitler was an artist too ...

alastor moon:
adalph hitler was bipolar, jack teh riper....I can't remebwe what he was suspected of having but there is an old saying and i say it is true, with genious comes madness. I myself have bipolar disorder.

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