Brian Sewell and the Rise of State-Approved Art

During those happy days when I was as likely to be found on a plane to Paris or Venice as on an express train heading to Edinburgh I soon learned not to discuss what the purpose of my trip was or what my role might be when I arrived at my destination. That was so I might not get involved in a conversation either with the IT expert seated on my right or the financial consultant seated to my left about the possible purposes of art criticism—nor feel obliged to respond for the umpteenth time to the following question: “Surely all art criticism is simply a matter of subjective opinion?”

Over the preceding years I had indeed formulated a number of responses to this tiresome query but often found these relied too much on my questioner’s knowledge—or lack of it—of art history. The all-purpose answer I favour is this: “If you take the six centuries of European art from the time of Giotto to the death of Gauguin in 1903 you will find there is a huge consensus among experts about who the truly outstanding artists were and who were merely the also-rans. So kindly tell me whether this overwhelming consensus is a matter of pure coincidence or perhaps one of covert conspiracy among international scholars?”

The true essence of the matter is this: violent disagreement among so-called experts about the respective merits of artists does not really begin until we start to deal with those artists principally active from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards—for example, from the first Fauves exhibition in 1906.

Thus if we apply the largely aesthetic criteria by means of which many of us consider Giotto, Leonardo, Titian, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Vermeer, Goya, Constable, Manet and van Gogh, say, to be utterly outstanding artists, how then may we apply exactly the same critical criteria to Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol or Joseph Beuys—let alone to Jeff Koons or Damian Hirst—and then consider them similarly to be great artists?

The short answer is that we can do no such thing; it is only by altering the qualities thought vital for outstanding artistic excellence more or less entirely—for example, by trying to make mere novelty a virtue in itself—that we can even begin to come up with such a result.

I preface my words about the last published anthology of Brian Sewell’s art criticism, Naked Emperors, in this manner simply to establish a few ground rules, not just regarding the excellent book itself but also about the dilemmas which face contemporary art in general.

Brian and I both began our mainstream critical careers in 1984: in his case at London’s Evening Standard and in mine at the Spectator. Inevitably our paths crossed frequently before I came to Australia to work in 1995. To state that Brian was a highly respected rival rather than a particular friend merely reflects a divergence in our extra-mural activities, because in terms of art criticism and reasoned argument I was and remain a paid-up admirer of one of the last true—and utterly fearless—defenders of lasting artistic values.

Naked Emperors contains thirty often lengthy articles of criticism of English contemporary art. In general these articles are as remarkable for their high-flying prose as for their biting and often hilarious wit.

The presence of wit is especially vital to the book, because much of what Sewell describes might otherwise seem deeply depressing. Yet the essays all deal with figures proposed by other critics from our present thickheaded age as being thoroughly deserving of national and international fame. While some of the artists described in the anthology will probably be unfamiliar to Australian audiences, the issues with which Sewell deals are universal as well as timeless.

Of course, working in close proximity to Europe and not too far from America makes it much easier for British critics to base their beliefs on a deep knowledge of international collections and masterpieces in a way that is impossible for most critics based here. Brian is therefore justifiably rude about the host of British and European critics who betray the knowledge readily available to them by buying into “equivalence” theories which are fundamentally false. Thus Sewell is right to ridicule the notion encouraged by authorities from the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2001, for instance, that Frank Auerbach is somehow “a Rembrandt of our times” by deliberately exhibiting an earnest but plodding painter at the same moment as one of the greatest masters who ever lived.

Such “equivalence” arguments represent false reasoning at its worst yet are very popular indeed—it hardly needs saying—with the ambitious dealers who represent fashionable contemporary artists. The lie is given to such silly arguments, of course, when the real thing is so often available to be seen in London itself or nearby continental Europe.

To his great credit, Sewell carries in his mind an exhaustive list of artists from earlier times whose achievements make the pretensions of over-praised artists from the present seem ludicrous at best. Thus, writing about Howard Hodgkin, whom too many now propose as some kind of “modern master”, Sewell says:

Since late June thirteen paintings by Howard Hodgkin have been hanging in Dulwich Picture Gallery. They are not confined to a single room, there to be venerated in a cataleptic trance; they are instead scattered among the distinguished pictures in the permanent collection, rubbing shoulders with Poussin, Ricci and Guercino, keeping company with Claude, Rubens and Rembrandt, illuminating all—or so we are told—the juxtaposition leading to our greater understanding of the present and the past, Hodgkin and his wonderful precursors speaking the same language. That is the official way of perceiving this chalk and cheese display.

Later from the same article he adds:

It is, of course, just possible that Dulwich is being subtle, guileful and subversive, its intention quite the reverse of what at first it seems—that Dulwich is, in fact, demonstrating how fatuous and vacuous contemporary art can be by hanging a sloppy Hodgkin between a pair of Poussins that we all know to be monuments of scrupulously careful pictorial construction, the contrast made perhaps to reassure the visitor who perceives the work of Hodgkin as pretentious trash.

Probably the names of David Hockney, Lucian Freud, Damian Hirst, Tracey Emin and Gilbert & George will be more familiar even to expert audiences here than that of Howard Hodgkin, and all are given a varied but largely justified degree of comeuppance in Sewell’s book. After all, Hockney and Freud have large and extremely ill-chosen works in the National Gallery of Australia where they bear witness to the general cluelessness of former directors of that institution.

I was in London last year when the vast exhibition “Australia”, largely sourced from the NGA, struck the Royal Academy with all the force of a much downgraded cyclone and Sewell was one of the many critics there to give it the thumbs-down. London is a much more sophisticated city now than when the 1961 exhibition of Australian art at the Whitechapel Gallery awoke many to the originality and insouciance of artists such as Nolan, Boyd and Whiteley. Very sadly for me, since I am a dual passport holder now, “Australia” was widely considered by British critics to be the worst major exhibition in London of its year.

How, with the considerable resources at its organisers’ disposal, could such an entirely unnecessary travesty occur?

Sewell’s book describes with great force how the development of “state” art in Britain and the rise of bossy, dumb or corrupt ancillary funding bodies have combined to usher in decades of generally worthless “official” state art. Indeed, Sewell describes Britain’s Arts Council, possibly too kindly, as “a nest of vipers”. I first locked horns with that body myself, to my professional disadvantage, way back in the 1970s. Sewell’s book is therefore not without relevance to Australia, where similar institutions exist which help render this country incapable of representing itself appropriately—or fairly—on an international stage. Think for a moment of some of the bizarre or atrocious choices made to represent Australia at prestigious international events such as Venice Biennales and you will see what I mean.

Today’s problems of art are international because they arise from the same or similar sources. That is why Sewell’s hugely entertaining book is one everyone with a true interest in the subject should make a strenuous effort to obtain and read.

Here is another sentence, drawn at random from the book, regarding a typical “state art” occasion held at the Tate Gallery:

There is, in the exhibition, not one single work of interest or merit. These are paintings that say with drip, splash and sweep of the brush: “Look, look, I am a painting”—but drip, splash and sweep of the brush are merely marks that reflect the physical action of the painter and, meaningless without intelligent purpose, are not enough to make a painting.

Do you feel, at this moment, some inclination to rise from your chair and cheer?

When I first started out in art—as a painter—it was fashionable in Britain and elsewhere to poke fun at the official state art of the Soviet Union, which frequently featured heroic tractor drivers or wives bidding last farewells to Red Army patriots setting forth to defend their motherland.

I was probably one of the first people in Britain to source and buy a book about such art: Vladislav Zimenko’s The Humanism of Art (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976). Its author signed my copy a dozen or so years later in Moscow’s Arts Club.

Here indeed was an example of art totally controlled by the state—indeed all too obviously so. In its favour, however, the artists involved generally underwent a six-year training on traditional lines which included courses in anatomy or—in the cases of sculptors—in the carving of marble. How many students in Western art schools know anything of such matters today?

Little did we imagine, nearly half a century ago, that official “state art”—of a more informal nature admittedly—would similarly rear its head in most Western democracies. Yet no Russian arts commissar probably ever achieved the power of such contemporary figures in Britain as Nicholas Serota at the Tate Gallery,  who effectively enjoys the “thumbs up/thumbs down” powers there of a Roman emperor. Instead of gladiatorial contests, however, Britain’s unfortunate public is treated to such meaningless non-contests as the annual Turner Prizes, which perhaps belong more properly in a totalitarian state such as North Korea. Sewell is scathing about such non-events:

It hardly matters who is chosen for the short list (though sceptics believe this is decided long before the year is out), or to whom the large prize is given by the judges, for the real and far larger arena is not within Tate Britain, but in the press, the media, the fashionable watering holes of Islington and the mahogany dining tables of Tunbridge Wells. In all these quarters the Prize is seen as a Brueghelian bout between drunken Carnival and sober Lent, blind Folly and dumb Wisdom, so weighted in favour of the Serota tendency that Carnival and Folly always win.

Brian has recently been desperately ill. Should he not survive I wish to pay tribute to the man who, as a dissident voice, has probably contributed more than any other to keeping the causes of sanity and scholarship alive in British art—although the critic David Lee, founder and editor of the arts magazine the Jackdaw, would run him a close second. The Jackdaw has just reprinted a lengthy essay I wrote for Quadrant in April 2006 on the grounds that it explains the complex dilemmas of Modernism in terms anyone interested can understand.

In the Spectator of February 17, 1996, the eminent historian and worthy amateur painter Paul Johnson was kind enough to include me among “only four outstanding art critics in Britain in the previous forty years” and I refer to this now only to take issue with one of his other inclusions: John Berger. The other two critics he named were Peter Fuller and Brian Sewell.

As a former Marxist, Fuller awoke late to the menace inherent in Berger’s theories, and most of Fuller’s books chart his disillusionment with Berger and his belated discovery of the merits of the nineteenth-century English critic John Ruskin. Sadly, Fuller was killed in a motor accident twenty-five years ago but he was never, in my view, the possessor of “a good eye”—in other words his aesthetic judgments were often fallible.

Berger was a strange paradox: the possessor of excellent aesthetic instincts which could easily find themselves swamped by his lifelong devotion to Marxist causes. His influence gave rise forty years ago to a school of so-called “social” critics devoted to “Marxist analysis” and to a belief that art should be judged for its social or political influence rather than by its intrinsic merit as art. A corollary to this fatal and ultra-destructive view was that “aesthetic” values were somehow a “bourgeois” myth—a means, in fact, whereby a privileged social class could impose its cultural tastes on less privileged ones. The so-called “culture wars” feature this kind of issue prominently, but if we substitute the words “well-educated” for the word “privileged” a rather different complexion emerges.

Almost all of the most stupid and unjustifiable art movements of the past forty years—such as “conceptualism”—arise from political theory. In the latter case the idea prevailed that if commercial dealers could be deprived of physical objects with which to trade then this would hasten the demise of capitalism. So art should be reduced simply to the concept or idea. For example, a phial of the bath water in which the artist bathed while ruminating his world-shattering ideas might suffice as “evidence”.

Essentially Sewell and I are aesthetic critics who would be as happy to write long essays on the superiority of Titian to Jacopo Bassano, say, a brilliant and original painter of the time—if someone had a use for them. But who is interested in intelligible criticism or scholarship today?