In Defence of Brian Sewell

Brian Sewell

Sir: In complimenting Dr Douglas Hassall (March 2015) on writing a lengthy and very well argued essay on English painter Frank Auerbach—and Quadrant no less on publishing it—I need nevertheless to raise an important cavil.

While Dr Hassall is thoroughly justified in dismissing a great deal of contemporary art criticism as piffle, he is quite wrong even to suggest that English art critic Brian Sewell is ever merely glib. Sewell, who has been undone finally only by ill health, has an excellent analytical mind, which is very rare indeed in art criticism, and couples this with an often stinging wit. His overall view in the thirty-odd years he has been writing regularly has been as consistently accurate—and fearless—as that of any critic working anywhere in the world.

It is my personal view that Sewell is more right than wrong in his criticisms of Auerbach. Even though many Quadrant readers may be unfamiliar with Auerbach’s work they will certainly know that of others whom Sewell damns much more roundly—such as David Hockney—in his latest anthology. Anyone with an interest in visual art can learn a great deal by reading Naked Emperors (Quartet Books, 2012) not least about the craft of writing itself, a matter all of us should continue to respect. (Thus, on a minor point, is there any chance of spelling Lucian Freud’s name correctly?)

I do not know Dr Hassall personally but thoroughly endorse his enthusiasm for a great subject, the vital human importance of which has been neglected increasingly of late. May I leave him however with a small request: that he obtains and reads a lengthy essay I wrote in Quadrant of April 2006. This piece has just been reprinted in an English magazine on the grounds that its subject—the basic dilemma of modernism itself—may still be of some relevance to us all.

In the days when I was still a full-time critic I discovered a much older German painter of Jewish extraction who, like Auerbach, was essentially living in exile—in her case in Sweden. This was Lotte Laserstein, whom I rate as the finest female practitioner of the twentieth century. Her name will probably be unfamiliar to most readers, as will that of her predecessor and fellow countryman Adolf von Menzel, whom no less a figure than Degas regarded as the finest painter of the entire nineteenth century.

In art much still remains to explore, and Dr Hassall’s enthusiasm should be welcomed.

Giles Auty
Leura, NSW

Blunt and the Letters

SIR: George Jonas, in his article “Traitors and Spies” (March 2015), claims that in 1956 Anthony Blunt was knighted by the Queen “possibly as a reward for helping to retrieve from Germany after the war some embarrassing letters written by the Duke of Windsor”.

I dealt with this canard, among many others, in my article “The Duke of Windsor and the Nazis” (Quadrant, July-August 2005). I stated:

Another furphy needs to be demolished, as it was highlighted a couple of years ago in a BBC television program entitled Cambridge Spies. Earlier still it was aired on England’s Channel Four in the no less deplorable program entitled The Traitor King …

King George VI in August 1945 allegedly entrusted Anthony Blunt with a secret mission to the Friedrichshof near Frankfurt to retrieve documents incriminating the Duke. As a result of its success Blunt was said to have gained immunity from prosecution as a spy by threatening to reveal all he knew. As Blunt’s biographer Miranda Carter stated, conspiracy theories of this kind “hardly bear scrutiny”.

In fact the King, in authorising this mission, had no reason even to suspect that documents of that character were held there. The mission, which the press reported, was undertaken on the initiative of the Librarian of Windsor Castle, Sir Owen Morshead, whose well-founded concern was that the US occupation forces might purloin some 4000 letters of Queen Victoria to her eldest child the Empress Frederick. Blunt, the Surveyor of the King’s Pictures since April 1945, was co-opted as Morshead’s subordinate because of his fluency in German. The documents they were seeking were secured and stored at Windsor until it was decided in 1951 that they could be safely returned to the Friedrichshof. No document concerning the Duke of Windsor was retrieved.

In 1956 the Queen appointed Blunt a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (KCVO) which was a customary award for senior members of the Royal Household who had given long service. It is a grotesque fantasy to claim that this award was extracted with menaces.

Blunt’s confession was made in 1964, not 1963 as Jonas states. The Palace was informed of it and the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Michael (later Lord) Adeane was advised by MI5 that Blunt should be left where he was. He retired from the position of Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures in 1972 some years after Adeane’s successor, Sir Martin Charteris (later Lord Charteris of Amisfield), had blocked Blunt’s promotion to Knight Grand Cross (GCVO).

In reference to Blunt’s exposure in 1979, MI5 advised that it be postponed until after his death. The Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, rejected this advice on the advice of the Attorney-General, Sir Michael (later Lord) Havers.

J.B. Paul
Bellevue Hill, NSW

The ISIS Threat

SIR: The recent article by Graham Wood in the Atlantic on the ISIS threat and its structure gives us a reasonably coherent picture of their beliefs and operating methods. It also gives a clear picture about the threat to Western society.

At this time, ISIS’s capabilities do not extend to major foreign action or any type of effective aerial warfare and as such do not represent an immediate physical threat to most Western countries, other than a move into southern Europe via Turkey or similar areas. However, their immediate aim seems to be to occupy Islamic nations and impose their version of Islam.

ISIS will not for some time be a physical threat to the USA, China, India, and other major non-Muslim countries, other than by encouraging individual converts to carry out terrorist attracts on their home soil.

Why such a brutal and repressive version of Islam would be attractive is difficult for Western society to understand, but it clearly has an attraction for a percentage of the Middle East population and disaffected members of Muslim society in some Western countries.

Much of the Middle East is undergoing a revolution of both religion and forms of democratisation that we might not recognise as such, but which represents a huge leap towards lifestyles much closer to those in the West. The internet and mobile phones have created both international awareness of more desirable lifestyles and personal freedoms that are creating pressures on governments to respond.

ISIS is infiltrating these countries. Therefore the real responsibility to crush ISIS falls on the Middle East nations. The West may help with support, but the thrust and eventual victories must come from the Middle East nations. If Islam as a religion for modern societies is to survive it has to be able to protect itself from its extremists and keep them minimised, as has happened in the West.

There is a great opportunity for the Middle East nations to use this common enemy to create a situation where the two versions of Islam, Sunni and Shiite, can peacefully co-exist, as the different versions of Christianity do in Western society. The recent actions of the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi are an encouraging sign in that direction. Otherwise the Middle East will become dependent on the West for help in solving local problems and remain a backwater of the world.

Tony Caldersmith
via e-mail

The New Clerisy

SIR: I recently noticed an entry (“posting”) on Facebook about a project called “Close the Gap”. This is an enterprise of Oxfam, started in 2006, which aims to improve the plight of Australian Aborigines. The fact is that Aborigines on the average suffer poorer health, lower education, higher unemployment and worse housing conditions than other Australians. Oxfam states that the root causes of this scandalous state of affairs are 200 years of dispossession, racism and discrimination.

These causes being patently nonsensical, I decided to add my opinion. My response, on Facebook too, was to comment that the root cause of the problem was Aboriginal culture itself, and that we can only close the gap by getting rid of the more violent aspects of their culture, or by allowing them to carry on in special areas (as up north). You can’t, I suggested, have rule of law and a stone age culture together.

This rather mild statement raised such fury and venom that it quite stunned me. Some forty postings came my way of this kind, and when I looked at their senders’ profiles I found that they were associated with environmental, feminist, gay and other such causes. That is, the Left, not as a political apparatus or a rational position, but as a visceral reflex.

The one characteristic of all their replies was that none of them attempted to discuss my contribution, but went straight to attack. It was as if I had uttered a blasphemy of the most disgusting kind.

I realised that I had queried the basic tenet of what is now a fully grown cult, in which the believers have invested an enormous amount of emotional capital. In more traditional religious terms, I was putting their salvation in doubt.

One thinks of the very similar violence of reaction in fundamentalist Muslims, who have the perfect riposte to any criticism: decapitation. My admirers too wanted, I realised, just to shut me up, and as soon as possible. Was it because they were telling such huge lies about the world around us and could not defend themselves rationally? In their case, however, truth is purely and simply whatever favours the Cause. Very much the communist position, if you remember, but these exaltés of aboriginality and the rest are not communists as far as I can tell. Nor are they even “useful fools” and fellow travellers. They are a force in their own right and hold sway in whole sections of our (middle-class) population.

We have only recently had the shock of realising how easy it is for jihad to spring up in the streets of our own cities in the West. Now it seems it isn’t just imported, homicidal levantine broodings that we have to worry about. The phenomenon is right here in its own right, often in some of the better suburbs.

Why has this group arisen? While this is just a sketch and the topic is worthy of a whole book, one can see a few causes straight off.

One is that we have always had a puritan, dictatorial streak in British society, going back to Cromwell and his merry men. The 1960s and the 1970s tapped quite heavily at times into this righteous, elitist stratum. (Remember Pete Seeger? Peter, Paul and Mary? Bob Dylan?)

Another cause could be that the dismantling of the nuclear family has now gone on so long that we have several generations of Australians who are under-parented, especially under-fathered, and very angry with the world. Hence the constant rant against patriarchy. Everything that our parents worked to produce is suspect, and the deep hatred of soldiers and guns and our armed forces is indication enough, if proof were needed, as is the automatic condemnation of our factories, our mines, our farms. Self-hate here becomes a deep and abiding hatred of society itself, a need to sabotage, demolish and destroy, an apocalyptic nihilism towards our very nation.

Who then are these people? Peter Murphy in his article in the March Quadrant analyses the weakening of middle-class America and makes a useful suggestion. It is that the upper levels of the middle class have become a group of their own which he calls the clerisy, and that this group is now dominating our polity. It operates through the media, entertainment, government, universities and corporations, in the main, has a huge collective income and an enormous say in how we think about the world around us. It is a group which however produces very little. Rather it simply passes favours and jobs and grants around among its own members, lives on our taxes, and also fosters various politically correct causes, such as global warming, aboriginality, gay rights, feminism, population control. At the same time, as money and control shift upward, less money or jobs are available to the working classes (I simplify my terms) and to the lower end of the middle class, which as a result is steadily sinking. The middle class is being hollowed out.

But the demolition is not simply economic and structural, it is ideological. In each of the politically correct causes I name above, one sees a special privileging of this or that group, and a corresponding disenfranchising of the common people. More, the target group lucky enough to be given victim status is seen as the repository of all virtue and the rest of us are bigoted, racist, insincere, hypocritical and even homicidal slobs. We have, effectively, no rights. Thus when the Righteous, or their slightly psychotic spokespersons, speak to us, it is with violence and extreme rudeness. We are worthy only of their greatest contempt.

I refrain from making tempting comparisons with Nazism or communism. What is, however, clear is that the new ideologies are essentially totalitarian, in that the Cause (in its various forms) trumps any concerns for justice, legality, decency, basic rights or indeed even for reality itself. Those who hold such a card (the Idea of the ideology) are therefore empowered to do whatever they want, potentially, and have the right to probe deep into our private lives. Under sharia law we would be deprived of freedom of religion. Under the rule of the clerisy we are being deprived of freedom to even think, or feel independently. As in any totalitarian set-up, all our loyalties not aimed at the Cause are suspect and to be eliminated. Our children, our spouses, our pets, our churches, our pubs, in fact all that makes up civil society, has to go, has to be legislated out of existence. We have of course already travelled far down that path and the all-intrusive voice of the media has been of enormous help in moving us there.

As for the old totalitarian systems, in my opinion their managers were rank amateurs compared to the contemporary political correct. Our basic grasp of reality is at stake now, and perhaps, therefore, we should seriously question the ideas by which we negotiate the world around us, in particular that part we call our nation, for I feel that it is well on the way to being thoroughly demolished.

Peter Gilet
Belmont, WA

Union Influence

SIR: In Peter Ryan’s article “Curtin, Chifley and Whitlam” (January-February 2015) he writes of his debt to J.B. Chifley for his visionary rehabilitation scheme for returned service personnel which “brought my university place years closer than my peace-time prospects would ever had suggested likely”. He refers, of course, to the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme (CRTS), of which my father, Ernest Borland Stanbury, was Supervisor in Western Australia.

My father, a First World War veteran (he was awarded an MBE for bravery on the Western Front) who was called back to serve in Army Intelligence in the Second World War, had become a teacher. As with many teachers, then and now, he was a supporter of the Labor Party. This allegiance caused a serious rift with his brother Harry, who had lost an arm at Gallipoli and who went into private enterprise after the war, running a corner store.

After trades training through CRTS, veterans sought my father’s help in getting jobs. The unions in Western Australia refused to admit these men to their ranks and fiercely protected the jobs of members who had not seen war service. My father was incensed, to the extent that his political views did a right turn.

Harry was delighted Dad had seen the light and, after accepting a sincere apology, the brothers were reunited.

Joan Stanbury
Noosa, Qld

Chosen Paths

SIR: What a pleasure to read Nana Ollerenshaw’s tribute to Robert Frost (January-February 2015). I share her gratitude for “The Road Not Taken”.

Frost himself is said to have noted characteristically that “You have to be careful of that one; it’s a tricky poem—very tricky.” The fact that it is often mistitled as “The Road Less Traveled” helps to underscore his point.

Frost’s poem, and his interaction with Edward Thomas which inspired it, is about distorted perceptions, rose-coloured imaginings, regret, frustration that we cannot have all results from all our choices, and our very human propensity to wonder not just “What if?” but “Might it have been better?” He even plays with and reflects our blurring of fact and fantasy as the paths were “just as fair”, “really about the same” and “equally lay”.

What “made all the difference” is not the path chosen but the committed taking of that path (either path), and not pining for the other one. Good advice and beautifully written.

Geoff Fletcher
Melbourne, Vic

Wendy Cope

SIR: Thank you for the very fine poetry essay by John Whitworth (March 2015). More please. And thanks to him for mentioning John Clare.

Whitworth does, however, convey a rather misleading impression deriving from Wendy Cope’s replies in a public question-and-answer session; as well as writing from the heart, which she recommended to her audience, she is a consummate practitioner in her use of rhyme and rhythm, a craft that she, like Schubert and his notes, was glad to master.

Suzanne Edgar
Garran, ACT