The Yellow Man is a canonical masterpiece in the work of Christopher Wood. It is among the artist’s best known, most widely exhibited and widely referenced paintings. During the fabled last year of Wood’s short life, his emotional turmoil and unstable personality found expression in paintings such as The Yellow Man. Its ambiguous imagery evokes a nocturnal, dream-like scenario. The figures were suggested by characters from a contemporaneous carnival ballet, Luna Park, and the setting is Chelsea, London, where Wood had a residence in Minton Place, off Bury Street. The church tower that looms in the background is identifiably St Luke’s and Christ Church, Sydney Street. Many aspects of the scene are distorted. The streetscape is rendered using multiple, contrasting perspectives, such that the buildings appear to slant and loom upwards, and the figures are invested with strange, extenuated proportions.

Two figures advance towards the viewer, an adult and a child, both of them wearing capes. Their skin tones are modelled in the eery pallor of grisaille. The stone-like, distorted quality of their bald heads is contrasted with the warm hues of their costume: the adult wears a full-length yellow costume akin to a ballet stocking with a black cape, while the child wears white with a red cape. These figures were suggested by a one-act carnival ballet for which Wood designed costumes and scenery. In November 1929, he described the ballet in a letter to his friends Winifred and Ben Nicholson as ‘a tent in a fair [where] phénoménes […] do funny things and dance afterwards.’ Luna Park was commissioned by a theatrical manager, C. B. Cochran, with a narrative by Boris Kochno, choreography by George Balanchine and music by Lord Berners. It was part of the Cochran Revue, opening at the London Pavilion on 27 March 1930, and was widely admired by many in Wood’s circle; his friend Lucy Wertheim attended four performances. The protagonists in the ballet were circus performers in a ‘freak pavilion’. Among them were a three-headed man, a three-legged juggler, and so on. In the narrative, the performers abandon their false limbs and flee the circus, exposing their employer—the showman—to ridicule. The figures depicted in The Yellow Man are closely comparable to those in Wood’s preparatory costume designs for Luna Park (fig. 1).

Following a statement by Kochno, who was friends with Wood, some art historians have argued that the artist identified himself with the disturbed figures in The Yellow Man. Kochno wrote that the performers in Luna Park were ‘impassive during the day’, but by night they ‘shake themselves free of their strange forms and like Kit Wood, discover a second existence, full of secret passions and torments hidden from the general public.’ The erotic charge of Wood’s poetic vision, concealed in The Yellow Man, is strongly apparent from another of his studies for Luna Park (fig. 2), in which horses and male nude figures entwine themselves.

The year 1930 marked a final creative outpouring in Wood’s short life, and The Yellow Man was one of the paintings that mark this episode as the most original in his career. In these late works, naming The Yellow Man amongst them, John Rothenstein perceived ‘the emanation of a very rare spirit.’ In The Yellow Man specifically, Rothenstein detected ‘an undertone of menace’. The haunting mood of the painting has been widely remarked. Writing in 1979, Wood’s close friend the painter Winifred Nicholson called him ‘an individual’ and ‘unique’, and suggested that his work occupies ‘the regions between poetry and art.’ She went on to reference ‘the nightmare of the yellow ghost’. Working with feverish intensity in the throes of an opium addiction, Wood produced a considerable number of paintings in his last year. The art historian Virginia Button has suggested a causal link between the ‘[m]ysterious, hallucinatory and faintly sinister’ quality of these late paintings, especially The Yellow Man, and the artist’s dependency on the drug.

Along with his friends Winifred and Ben Nicholson, Wood began to experiment with the technical foundations of oil painting following his encounter in 1928 with the naïve, self-taught fisherman-artist Alfred Wallis. The Yellow Man was executed with inventive, lively applications of paint and scrapings of the brush and brush handle. The branches of the trees are partly scratched in with the brush handle. The richly textured surface quality was almost certainly achieved with Coverine, a glue which Wood sometimes applied as an underlayer to produce a pattern of raised brushstrokes. The narrow palette of colours used to finish the painting—black, white, red, yellow—may suggest that Wood used Ripolin, a type of commercial oil paint made popular among artists by Picasso. The technique of densely textured underlayers and a surface coating of colour is in keeping with the use of Ripolin.

Both the imagery and style of The Yellow Man made a significant contribution to the emerging artistic phenomenon of Neo-Romanticism. In Paris, Wood became acquainted with key protagonists in the new movement. Its origins lay in the Saltimbanques and Harlequin imagery of Pablo Picasso’s ‘blue’ and ‘rose’ periods, and the movement rejected abstraction in favour of strong but ambiguous emotional content, surrealist distortion and isolated, morbid figure types including wanderers, vagrants and circus performers. Pioneers of the movement included Wood’s friend Christian Bérard, whom he called ‘the most interesting of the young painters in Paris’, and two other painter-designers, Eugène Berman and Pavel Tchelitchew. Virginia Button has related The Yellow Man to these artists’ work and more specifically to ‘the homoerotically-charged world of the Ballet’.

Beyond the confines of twenties and thirties Paris, Christopher Wood’s late paintings such as The Yellow Man created a foundation for English developments in Neo-Romanticism. To a considerable degree, Wood’s late work anticipated the layering, raised textures and jarring effects of light apparent in much of John Piper’s early Neo-Romantic work of the forties. So much was apparent to at least one critic, writing in The Listener in 1951, who observed that ‘[a]t least one of his [Wood’s] pictures suggests a remarkable anticipation of John Piper’. The exhibition under review included The Yellow Man. In his 1942 monograph British Romantic Art, Piper made no reference to Wood. The jarring, pseudo-surrealist imagery of Wood’s painting also provided an instructive precursor to the early work of Lucian Freud.

The history of ownership of The Yellow Man is well-documented and distinguished. It was first acquired from Wood by the dealer and modern art enthusiast Lucy Wertheim on 29 March 1930, just two days after the premiere of Luna Park. She was an important promoter and collector of Wood’s paintings at a time when his reputation was uncertain. In her memoir, Adventure in Art, Wertheim remembered meeting Wood for the first time in spring 1929, shortly after purchasing one of his paintings from the dealer Arthur Tooth. Wertheim and Wood quickly became close friends, and she shortly afterwards formed the ambition of starting a gallery in London ‘to help to [recognise] the young English painter’. She acquired The Yellow Man at the inception of this idea. Upon seeing the painting, she recalled, ‘It did not take me five minutes to decide that it was quite the best thing he [Wood] had painted up to date.’ Wertheim subsequently purchased ten more paintings by Wood from his exhibition at Galerie Georges Bernheim in Paris.

In the period that Wertheim owned and displayed The Yellow Man, it was passionately admired by Lady Ottoline Morrell, an eminence grise of avant-garde culture in interwar-period Britain. Wertheim wrote: ‘[Lady Ottoline] coveted several of my most treasured paintings and frequently brought her friends to see them. Her favourites were “The Yellow Man”, “The Breton Sailor”, and “The Crocus”.’

The painting was bought from Wertheim in 1935 by Brinsley Ford, himself an eminent and prolific art collector. In her memoir, Wertheim recalled how the commercial failure of her gallery forced the sale of The Yellow Man:

"I was in such low water that I was prevailed upon to sell this well loved painting by Christopher Wood. […] One morning I got a communication […] to the effect that a client had seen the “Yellow Man” in my sitting room in Albany and expressed a wish to buy it. He had offered three hundred and fifty pounds for it. The matter was urgent. Would I wire my decision. I telegraphed that the painting was not for sale. I could not bring myself to part with it. […] The following morning I got a cajoling letter from Brinsley Ford himself, the would-be purchaser (and a regular client from early days). I yielded. The “Yellow Man” changed hands. When Mr Ford wrote me that he had surrendered his long booked air reservation to Switzerland in order to enjoy his painting for a few days longer it took the edge off my regret at parting with my treasure."

One of Sir Brinsley Ford’s specialisms was modern British pictures, and he later described The Yellow Man as his ‘favourite modern picture’. Writing in 1946, he found the painting to possess ‘a haunting magic’. He later wrote of the painting:

"I cannot find the right word to describe the pleasure that it has given me over sixty years—magical with an undercurrent that is both sinister and strange, fantasy mixed with reality, a world of dreams based on memories of figures from a ballet called Luna Park set against the church of St Luke in Chelsea, close to Minton Place where Wood lived."