LONDON WALTER SICKERT’S reputation may never recover from being fingered as Jack the Ripper by the American crime writer Patricia Cornwell five years ago.

Art critics and historians have dismissed the charges, based on an investigation that cost her $2million, as circumstantial, ignorant and downright fanciful without quite shaking the macabre link between one of Britain’s greatest painters and the Victorian serial killer who disembowelled five prostitutes in the East End of London in 1888.

Now audiences have a chance to judge for themselves whether Sickert was a killer or just an artist with a particularly ghoulish imagination when the paintings which Cornwell cited as evidence of her suspicions are displayed together for the first time.

Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Nudes at the Courtauld Institute of Art in Central London from October aims to “provide the first major account of his reinvention of the nude as a subject for modern painting.”

The star attractions among more than 25 canvases and related drawings will be four profoundly disturbing paintings from around 1908 known as The Camden Town Murder paintings.

Inspired by the notorious murder of Emily Dimmock, a young prostitute, in her lodging house the previous year they depict prone, naked women in impoverished rooms overshadowed by sinister clothed men.

Cornwell thought that they amounted to a painted confession from the artist to crimes committed 20 years earlier.

Dr Barnaby Wright, the curator of the exhibition has no doubt that Sickert was not the Ripper and prefers to concentrate on the paintings’ ambivalence.

“There are no slashed throats and you can’t tell if the women are dead or not. Sexual danger, threat, even murder could be present but one of the paintings could also be read as a couple facing terrible hardship together. What fired Sickert’s imagination was the unknowability of the darker aspects of London and of Camden.”

Sickert deliberately manipulated this ambiguity, occasionally displaying the paintings under less salacious titles such as What Shall We Do For The Rent or Summer Afternoon rather than explicitly linking them to a crime scene.

The German-born Sickert was a protege of Whistler who helped pioneer the impressionist movement in England and became a friend of Degas while living in France.

A younger group of artists persuaded him to return to London in 1905 and they formed England’s first twentieth century avant garde: The Camden Town Group, named after the seedy and sometimes dangerous area of North London where Sickert lived and worked.

Sickert wrote that he sought the ‘sensation of a page torn from the book of life’ and in Camden’s shadowy world of whores, slum landlords, petty criminals and lurking violence he found it.

“He was interested in the raw subject matter of crime, working class life and the shocking effect its portrayal had on the middle-classes,” Dr Wright said.

“He settles on the nude as a subject because he thinks that it has become entirely bankrupt and he wants to bring it back in touch with reality.

“Instead of painting classical goddesses in pastoral scenes he depicts prostitutes in seedy bedsits where you are forced to wonder exactly what scene you have stumbled upon.”

When Sickert exhibited some of his Camden Town Murder paintings in 1911The Daily Telegraph wondered ‘at his choice of subjects more worthy of the “Police News” than a picture gallery of high rank’, and the The Commentator queried a name which ‘honoured a part of London that one more naturally associates with murders than with art’.

They were unmistakeably powerful. Fred Brown, Professor of Painting at the Slade School of Art broke off his friendship with Sickert because he found the work too sordid. Other acquaintances of the artist were appalled and titillated by Sickert’s outlandish claims to know the identity of Jack the Ripper and his unrepentant fascination with unsolved crimes and the underbelly of London life.

“He was a showman but he was also a profound artist,” Dr Wright said. “These nudes can now be seen as a seminal moment in the history of modern British painting. They could only have appeared at the pivotal time between the end of Victorian narrative painting and the arrival in this country of more experimental works by the likes of Cezanne, Gaugin, Van Gough and Picasso. And with their concern for the rawness of the body and the material quality of paint, their influence can still be felt in the work of artists like Frank Auerbach and Lucien Freud.”

Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Nudes is at the Courtauld Institute of Art from October 25 2007 to January 20 2008

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