Fearless, contrarian, anti-populist ...and the voice of a Duchess!
IEXPECT you want to fire me,’ were the first words that Brian Sewell ever said to me, the day I became Editor of the London Evening Standard. ‘I’m prepared to go, just tell me when. I’ll do whatever is needed to save the paper.’
The words were uttered in his imperial cut-glass accent, a voice crystallised from the 1940s, drawnout vowels like a Duchess from another era. The paper was having financial difficulties but the last thing I wanted was to lose its most famous writer. He was, even then in 2009, an art critic who was a national institution.
What marked him out was learning, populism – and fearlessness. As well as that voice. The art world includes many toadies and wearers of the emperor’s new clothes; he was not one of them. He was universally seen as the impossible-to-ignore art critic. He was also the contrarian, sometimes the anti-populist – deriding, for example, the choice of Liverpool as European Capital of Culture in 2008.
For many modern artists, it was almost a badge of honour to be harpooned by his waspish words. Lucian Freud would make sure he got the Standard on a Thursday precisely because that was the day Sewell railed.
‘We called him Brian A***-Sewell,’ David Hockney would joke to Freud.
Brian spoke bald truths that punctured reputations and were impossible to ignore because they were written by a man who knew more than anyone about art history. All big-name contemporary artists – particularly the ‘conceptual’ ones – from Damien Hirst to Anish Kapoor, were humiliated by his caustic lashings and had to take it on the chin, knowing everyone in the art world would have read it.
BUT Brian was no ivory tower intellectual, and was as happy to work behind the counter in Oxfam in Wimbledon Village as to attend exhibitions in Whitechapel or The National Gallery.
Sewell was, though, grounded in deep learning of classical art and was impatient with the feeble faddishness of many modern artists and the art establishment as a whole, firing off torpedoes loaded and deadly against the most powerful and famous. Never more notably than against Sir Nicholas Serota, the all-powerful director at the Tate.
He was never afraid of unfashionable causes. When Anthony Blunt, his old tutor at The Courtauld Institute of Art, was unmasked as a spy, Brian emerged as pretty much his only public protector. It was the first time Sewell was widely noticed. Many attacked him for standing by such a scoundrel but none could dispute his loyalty. His brilliant clarity of thought and critical acumen remained beyond question.
His knowledge of the Old Masters was the foundation of everything for Brian. After attending The Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School in Hampstead, where he was bullied for his precocity, he had wanted to be a painter or violinist. Two years doing National Service made him
change his mind and he went to the Courtauld and from there to Christie’s, but he was never made for corporate life.
Instead, it was in journalism that he prospered – firstly at Tatler, where Editor Tina Brown hired him as a critic in the aftermath of the Blunt scandal, and from where he eventually joined the Standard, to become a national figure.
He always yearned to write definitively about Michelangelo and Bosch, but it was his sensational and never-less-than-amusing lashing of contemporary artists that made him essential reading. He came out aged 38 and was then flagrantly confessional about his sexual conquests in his memoirs, boasting of hundreds of lovers. Nothing was conventional or dull in his life.
In his later years, he would discover his biological father had been the composer Peter Warlock (real name Philip Heseltine), who killed himself before he was born. It was his mother who instilled in him a love of art.
For a man who was ruthless and deadly with the pen, he was unusually sentimental when it came to canine friends. He also loved cars with passion – and was motoring correspondent for the Standard as a sideline. He found it too upsetting to go abroad to Third World countries as he hated seeing stray dogs ill-treated.
His books and articles railed against an arts establishment that he felt was blind and slanted. He was mischievous and funny, and teetotal in his last years. He eschewed taxis, even in the final months of his life when he was fighting cancer. He never wanted to linger. He even talked of taking his own life if he could, rather than suffer.
It was again an extreme version of dealing with the world around him – just as he took no hostages in the art world, he would not take himself as a hostage.
HE TITLED his memoirs, Outsider: Always Almost: Never Quite. In fact, outsider is not quite right: He became part of the arts establishment simply by being outstanding.
The last time I saw him at his house in Wimbledon, filled with his lifelong art collection, he greeted me in his driveway mid-morning in his dressing gown, like a prophet from the Old Testament, white-haired and courteous.
‘Park here,’ he commanded. With that voice, even on a snowy day, there was no other option but to listen and obey.