The Bowie favourite finally making a splash
Considered obscure, the artist joked: ‘Even my mother doesn’t know who I am’
At the Sotheby’s sale of the David Bowie collection two years ago, I sat and watched as record after record tumbled for what I call the OBAS (the Old British Artists, as opposed to the YBAS, the Young British Artists, of the Damien Hirst era). Prices for contemporary artists such as Stephen Finer, Ken Currie, John Bellany, William Tillyer and Ian Mckeever, long sidelined by the auction rooms, were selling for multiple estimate prices.
Among the OBAS was John Virtue, a landscape painter who studied under Frank Auerbach and has worked entirely in black and white since the late Seventies, when he had a eureka moment and destroyed everything he had produced before that point. His use of monochrome, and the fact he has always painted unpopulated landscapes from the beginning, are the two characteristics that mark him out.
“As a child, I responded more to where I was than to the people around me,” he told curator Paul Moorhouse in a recent interview. Such is the intensity of his working practice, drawing fast as he walks and working the sketches up later in the studio, that colour, he says, is “an unnecessary distraction”. Inspired by Turner, Constable, Rembrandt and Van Ruisdael, as well as Japanese Zen calligraphy, he compresses their impressionistic style into a black and white palette that bursts with subtle variations of light and tone.
In his time, Virtue, 71, has attracted significant critical attention and exhibited with a number of high-profile galleries such as Lisson, Bernard Jacobson and Marlborough Fine Art. He is also shown by LA Louver, the gallery that represents David Hockney in America. In 2003, Virtue became associate artist at the National Gallery, and his paintings inspired by the London landscape and skyline were rapturously praised by commentators such as Simon Schama and The Daily Telegraph’s Richard Dorment.
The list of top-tier public galleries that have shown his work is impressive: from The Serpentine and Whitechapel galleries in the Nineties to Tate St Ives, The Courtauld Institute, London’s National Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art in the 2000s, and the Sainsbury Centre and the Towner Art Gallery in the present decade.
And yet, he remains relatively obscure. In a recent interview, the arts broadcaster Andrew Graham-dixon commented that Virtue had somehow “slipped through the cracks”. In reply, the artist joked: “Even my mother doesn’t know who I am.” While Virtue may care little for such things, his work has not been courted by the market. At the time of the Bowie sale, his auction record was about £5,000. But, on the day, that record was surpassed by each of the four lots offered, the largest painting selling for a 10-times estimate of £40,000.
One of the bidders at Sotheby’s was Michael Hue-williams, a creative dealer who was the first in this country to show the Chinese political activist Ai Weiwei and the American light artist James Turrell. Huewilliams had to close his London gallery in 2009 and, since then, has been representing his artists from a converted barn in Oxfordshire. At the sale, he told me he was not surprised at Virtue’s prices. He has represented the artist since 2016 and sells his work at anything from £6,000 to £100,000 for the larger pieces.
One of his jobs is to get Virtue’s work seen in the right places, and from today and in the weeks leading up to and during next month’s Frieze week, a retrospective of 60 paintings will be on view in Piccadilly’s Fortnum & Mason, as the sole focus of the entrepreneurial art collector Frank Cohen’s annual exhibition there. Cohen has a soft spot for Virtue because in the late Seventies, when the artist was hard up, he worked as a postman in Accrington in Lancashire, and was a daily visitor to Cohen’s DIY store. Like Hue-williams, Cohen believes Virtue is a sleeping giant among contemporary artists because he is so good, and so underrated.
Many of the paintings at Fortnum’s are inspired by the sea and the walks that Virtue takes along the coast to Blakeney Point in Norfolk, where he lives and where the turbulent weather and sea conditions clearly put him in Turneresque mode.
At Fortnum’s, among all the tasteful and elegant consumerist displays, his vigorous monochromes will create some striking juxtapositions – standing out as they should, and making the art market finally sit up.