Mark Gertler painted The Sari in 1938, within fifteen months of the June afternoon on which he would gas himself in his Highgate studio at 5 Grove Terrace. He did not send it to a dealer. He gave it to his niece, Mrs R. Diamond, and there, passing thence to her daughter, it remained in the family for more than sixty years before re-appearing on the open market in the 1990s. A work of ambition rooted within European modernism, it belongs to a critical period of monumental figurative works by one of the most extraordinary artists of his generation.

Gertler’s origins were the least promising of any Slade School candidate of his generation, a formidable set which included

The personality that accompanied the talent made him the object of the literary industry. He is the Mendel of Gilbert Cannan’s Mendel of 1916, the Loerke of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love of 1920, the Gombauld of Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow of 1921; Lady Ottoline Morrell took him up, and at Garsington he moved among Bertrand Russell, Lytton Strachey, Katherine Mansfield and the Lawrences. Virginia Woolf, meeting him in 1918, recorded the encounter in her diary with the coolness she reserved for those she could not place: ‘an immense egoist… He means by sheer willpower to conquer art’.

Fry’s Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries in the winter of 1910–11 was, as for all his Slade generation, the hinge. Gertler later wrote, with characteristic hyperbole, that ‘The entry of Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse etc., upon my horizon was equivalent to the impact of the scientists of this age upon a simple student of Sir Isaac Newton’. This critical and passionate engagement resulted in his defining work, Merry-Go-Round of 1916 (Tate), the single modern painting of the First World War that has no equal on the British side of the Channel. D. H. Lawrence recognised what it was the moment he saw it. ‘Your terrible and dreadful picture Merry-Go-Round’, he wrote to Gertler on 9 October 1916, ‘is the best modern picture I have seen: I think it is great and true’.

Nothing afterwards would carry the same thunder, and Gertler knew it. Through the 1920s, weakened by the tuberculosis first diagnosed in 1920 and confined recurrently to sanatoria, he worked at female portraits, still lifes and the full and generous nudes of his Goupil Gallery decade. The turn came in 1934. That year he painted the Mandolinist (Tate), a three-quarter-length draped figure whose reference to Picasso’s Seated Woman in a Chemise of 1923 (also Tate) is exact and declared; he worked at it in fifty-seven one-hour sittings from the model. Introduced to Henry Moore in 1932 and keenly aware of Moore’s and Hepworth’s advance towards the monumental, Gertler now gave his figures a sculptural weight he had not sought before. A short series followed: Musical Bather of 1934, Nude with a Mandolin of the same year, Nude with Arms Folded of 1935. The Sari of 1938 is among the latest and, in its concentrated hieratic presentation, the boldest of them.

Against three broad fields of colour, the sitter stands three-quarter length, upright and frontal, her head turned to her own left in a quiet three-quarter regard. A long drapery of broad yellow and red stripes, worn as a hooded veil, frames her head, cascades in heavy folds down her right shoulder, and is caught at her left thigh by her hand; the right arm hangs loose, the palm open, and the wrist lightly turned. The fabric is the painting’s organising device. It contains the head, divides the ground, and returns along the lower edge in a single broad sweep of coral and gold. The face is structured in a few firm planes; a straight-bridged nose, a dark-lidded eye, a heavy sweep of black brow, a small, closed mouth. The warmth and boldness of the colour palette is echoed in the application of paint which is rich and energetic, nearly entirely applied with a palette knife. The background owes nothing to naturalism and everything to Picasso’s interior nudes of the 1920s, in which a few flat rectangles of colour frame and elevate the sitter.

Anthony Blunt, writing in The Spectator on Gertler’s 1934 Leicester Galleries show, accused him of insufficient originality; the criticism stung and contributed to the depressions of the final years. Taken on its own terms, however, the late series to which The Sari belongs represents not a failure of nerve but a deliberate and considered alignment with the senior tradition of twentieth-century European figuration, with the Picasso of the Dinard and Juan-les-Pins summers, and beyond him with Ingres. Painted in the last full year of Gertler’s working life, The Sari is a powerful example of its moment — and a reminder that the painter who had made Merry-Go-Round at twenty-four had not, at forty-six, given up the fight.