In Paris, he painted two portraits of Julien Zaïre, a Martiniquan who performed in cabaret as Tom Whiskey. Some were performers: Portrait of Paul Robeson as Othello (1930) was rediscovered during research for this exhibition (an earlier painting of the African American tenor Roland Hayes singing is still unaccounted for). His interest in Black subjects was unusual for its time.
Indebted to Picasso, Cocteau and Matisse, Philpot’s new style was less appreciated in London. Influenced by developments in Paris and Berlin, in 1930 he experimented with modernism, painting the chrome, glass and glow of the transforming city. A practising Roman Catholic and gay, mesmerised by performance and masquerade, he allowed his interest in the male nude to play out in (at times awkward) symbolist works on classical themes. Philpot appears an artist – and a man – pulled in several directions.
