The Irreplaceable Brian Sewell

When I wrote about the controversial English art critic Brian Sewell in the May edition of Quadrant I was aware that he was already seriously ill. Sadly Brian died on September 19 in London. I find it hard to believe I will never see his witty, informed and provocative articles in the Evening Standard again. That is a very great loss after nearly thirty-one years.

Our professional lives as critics began within weeks of each other in 1984 and I have been aware of Brian’s welcome presence in the greater firmament of critics ever since. Our backgrounds may have seemed quite different yet often we reached similar conclusions about the serious shortcomings of supposedly world-class recent artists and exhibitions. I believe that was because we tended to view all art in a greater context of time than the merely recent. Thus we might see a painter described by others as a highly significant figure of the moment but both of us could not help wondering how such an artist could really be held to rate in comparison with certain persons from previous centuries—Rembrandt, Velazquez and Vermeer from the mid-seventeenth century, for instance, or Degas, Manet and van Gogh, say, from the late nineteenth century.

Those are questions any art critic worthy of the name should be asking himself—at least in private—but to do so requires considerable knowledge of the history of art. Fudging a column together largely from press releases really will not do.

Brian possessed a great range of knowledge but rarely flaunted it. He consistently made contact with the intelligent general reader rather than merely with the chattering classes. Thank God there are still more of the former than the latter left in the world—an important fact which even astute editors of newspapers are sometimes slow to acknowledge.

In Australia the problem is often exacerbated because the arts are widely looked on here as an area merely of peripheral interest. If they are indeed so then that may simply be an indictment of the quality of critics and arts editors whom too many publications employ.

The visual arts are—or certainly should be—one of the great adornments of human history. Other than the saints and mystics, great practitioners of the visual arts deserve their place in the highest levels of human achievement.

How then does Australia stand in a world context? Too often we work ourselves up into a frenzy here about minor and parochial matters—dare one mention the Archibald—while remaining in woeful ignorance about significant world trends, ideas and events.

In Australia some overdue effort has been made by the present government to combat the widespread politicisation of art, which has been a too easily ignored effect of establishing bodies such as the Australia Council. I have always wondered why Maynard Keynes did not foresee widespread crony­ism and nepotism as inevitable consequences of public funding for the arts—in certain areas such as literature and the visual arts at least. Keynes was the driving force after the war behind the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, which later became the Arts Council in Britain and led in time to the foundation of the Australia Council here. An inability to foresee such likely consequences argues strongly against Keynes’s reputation as a major social visionary.

Sewell was a consistent critic of the realities of public funding rather than ever of the worthy idea in itself. Here is Sewell on the Arts Council:

The English, though much given to glorifying adventurers who did and died, and do-gooders single-minded enough to do the good themselves, are at heart a nation of committee members, cosy only in the comfort of corporate responsibility and the safety of numbers.

Of this the Arts Council is a prize example, burdened with committees on which some members sat … not for mere years but even for decades, and some sat on half a dozen concurrently and in sequence, bending their patronage to their own purposes and those of buddy-boys. Once a broad church in the visual arts, mounting exhibitions devoted to the old masters as well as modern, it now, with mightily increased funding, restricts its quite uncritical activities all but entirely to the support of immediately contemporary art, and is one of the engines that establishes and maintains the fame and fortune of the favoured few. This it contrives by excluding from its advisory groupies, and particularly from the rank of Councillors, all who have ever been critical of its activities. Margaret Thatcher when Prime Minister once expressed her wish to extinguish this nest of vipers, but neither she nor any minister since has seized the opportunity. Beyond reform, only by shutting it down and sending into exile all who have served on it or in its arrogant bureaucracy, starting again with a tabula rasa, shall we ever be able to devise a system for funding the arts that is not buddy-boy back-scratching and bureaucratic, but fair, simple, broadly based and swiftly effective.

During the eleven years in which I wrote a weekly art column for the Spectator I received only one invitation from the British Council to attend an exhibition which they had organised overseas, while certain more pliant colleagues received as many as sixteen in the same period. Those trips were generally extremely enjoyable, to lands such as Japan.

In my article in May I recommended readers of Quadrant to acquire the last anthology of Brian’s writing, Naked Emperors (2012). Wherever one turns in the book one encounters Brian at his funniest and most acerbic while at the same time making a vitally relevant point. Here he is describing an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1999 called “Examining Pictures”:

“Examining Pictures” is a rotten title for a shoddy little show that is a disgrace to the Whitechapel Gallery. Though the press release announced it as the great beginning of a new programme of exhibitions, the catalogue tells another tale—that far from being part of a coherent programme this exhibition is no more than an ill-considered impulse stemming from chance cocktail party chatter. To this the sane man’s only response is that the curators should have known that sound exhibitions depend on much more than whim and the heady whiff of alcohol, take many months to prepare, and are founded on a proper thesis rather than cod-aesthetics that expose them to accusations of intellectual incapability.

Their sixty odd pictures by sixty odd artists—and odd is certainly the word for most of both—give the impression of an entirely random choice, a morning’s shopping for the dregs of Cork Street, the discards of collectors who have learned something of connoisseurship since acquiring them, or the leftovers from a sale at Sotheby’s; the last thing in the world we could assume from them is that they represent the revival and resurgence of the art of painting—and yet this is the claim made by these curators.

Brian is sorely missed. It will be a long time—if ever—before we see his like again.