Brian Sewell and other matters

Sir: Giles Auty’s appreciation (November 2015) of the recently deceased Brian Sewell focused on the Englishman’s career as a controversial newspaper art critic with an acerbic tongue, but his talents were more significant and wide ranging than probably many Australians are aware of.

His father (who committed suicide before Sewell was born) was Peter Warlock, the composer. Born in 1931, Sewell studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art, became an acknowledged expert for Christie’s auction house, and later was an art dealer, so when he became art critic for the London Evening Standard in 1984 he had a thorough knowledge of the Old Masters and more recent art.

In the beginning he tried to be open-minded about the contemporary art scene but the mediocrity of artists like Damien Hirst and Banksy, the inane works of the Turner Prize, ludicrous installations, the ubiquitous presence of arts bureaucrats, the cynical networking of self-congratulatory artists and the deliberate opaqueness of art-speak soon disturbed him. His reviews were so cutting and true that in 1994 thirty-five artists and writers demanded the newspaper fire him. The signatories were second-rate artists and writers like Marina Warner who, typical of progressives, demand free speech for themselves but not for those they disagree with.

He was accused of being homophobic and misogynist, of course. But his main problem was that he was a critic in a time of awful Western art. He made several television documentary series, including a highly personal one about pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela (The Naked Pilgrim) and the delightful and eccentric ten-part series about the grand tours of Europe in the eighteenth century. His patrician manner and posh accent were criticised, but his refusal to dilute the content and his vocabulary was a refreshing change from the contemporary need to dumb down these things so as to appeal to the mythical “ordinary viewer”.

What are overlooked are his three memoirs. His two volumes about his life, Outsider: Always Almost: Never Quite and Outsider II: Always Almost: Never Quite are exceptional works. They are candid, disturbing (the description of his rape is extraordinary in its objectivity), erotic (once he discovered he was gay), honest, with a balanced dose of self-loathing and self-awareness, and historically interesting (his friendship with the traitor and art historian Anthony Blunt is vividly recalled). His gorgeous prose has an ease about it that makes the volumes impossible to put down. After buying the memoirs when I was working in London a couple of years ago I was so enthralled by them that I didn’t go out at night, just so I could finish them. They are an extraordinary achievement.

As a bonus he wrote a third memoir, Sleeping with Dogs: A Peripheral Autobiography, which is one of the best books about living with dogs I know of (and I’ve read plenty). It’s also a moving portrait of an emotionally vulnerable man who found his deepest friendships with his canine companions.

Even after he died an art reviewer disparaged his views that there have been no great women artists, and gays are still put off by his stance against gay marriage. What his critics didn’t and don’t understand is that every culture needs a Cassandra like Brian Sewell, someone who points out that the emperor has no clothes, that group-think is poisonous to new ideas, and arts lobbyists and bureaucrats are an impediment to great art.

Louis Nowra
Kings Cross, NSW

The Soviet purges

Sir: As a coda to the tributes to the great Robert Conquest and the question of “who knew what”, or perhaps “who cared at all”, I offer a report from our local paper, the Gloucester Advocate, on February 7, 1930. The report noted that the Bishop of Chelmsford had been informed by the Metropolitan of the Russian Synod of the slaughter of more than eight thousand priests, monks and nuns without trial. Also reported was the massacre of several hundred ex-naval officers.

It seems inconceivable that such reports, finding their way to a remote Australian newspaper, could have escaped the attention of any literate person in the UK or Europe. Even wilful ignorance is not a sufficient explanation for those who continued to support uncritically the regime and its political philosophy. Which explains why, to this day, you can still encounter people who view this and other twentieth-century horrors, provided they occurred under the correct banner, as necessary purges.
They have not forgotten the lessons of history. They just see a different lesson.

Jim Hoggett
Gloucester, NSW

Tony Abbott

Sir: John Carroll (Letters, November 2015) hasn’t “talked to anyone” who does not share his sentiment “that most of the country breathed a collective sigh of relief when Abbott was deposed”. He should get out of Fitzroy more. The people I have spoken to are disappointed that a good PM and, just as importantly, a good and genuine person, has been replaced by a left-leaning showman. But I would not presume to think that my circle is representative of the country as a whole. The same comment could be directed to Richard Forrest and his “wide variety of acquaintances”.

Michael Smith
Mooroolbark, Vic

Sir: The myth that Tony Abbott was a bad Prime Minister should be quashed at birth. He disappointed many conservatives with slowness and caution, but he was putting the building blocks in the right place, slowly but steadily. Had he been given a chance, and not been the victim of a political assassination by a man whose only demonstrated loyalty is to himself, he might have been as great a Prime Minister as Howard or Menzies. I hope he will, like both those great men, recover from being stabbed in the back and return.

Hal G.P. Colebatch
Nedlands, WA

The migration challenge

Sir: Nick Cater (October 2015) has made an admirable effort to make sense of a critical situation which has been long in coming and the end of which is nowhere to be seen.

Country-shopping now has a distinctly proletarian ring about it, even as most of the shoppers in this case are middle-class, educated and not without means. The rich have always been able to go where they pleased. The rest have been able to travel and settle in places of their choice only within the bounds set by financial considerations on their part and political considerations on the part of the host country of choice. Breaking and entering en masse by people determined to make their way to a country of their choice, as is happening in Europe, is novel in recent times.

Although the regular media is reluctant to flag developments which the ruling clique and its servant cliquelets in the West’s nation-states are wishing to keep under wraps until such developments cannot be stopped, the general public in the West is working out what’s afoot. It cannot be long now before people in Western Europe, at least, who have most to lose, are roused by events which they, and the media, are unable to ignore.

The West’s democratic principles have been subverted and perverted by those who have been charged to uphold and defend them against encroachment from without as well as from within. Now the race is on for the peoples of Europe to reassert their authority—that of the people by the people for the people.

Jacob Jonker
Fern Tree, Tas