Brian Sewell and the Evening Standard

The Evening Standard is known for being right-wing, which means therefore, that Brian Sewell's readers are generally well suited to his opinions.

Professional art critics are expected to have a keen eye for art and a thorough knowledge of art history. Knowledge, however, provides no guarantee that a critic will know if a work of art, an exhibition, or an artist will stand out in history as "great".

Many now famous and celebrated artists were not recognized by the art critics of their time, often because their art was in a style not yet understood or favored. Conversely, some critics, called militant critics have helped to explain and promote new art movements.

Art Criticism according to Wikipedia..yeh..

Art criticism is the discussion or evaluation of visual art.

Art critics usually criticize art in the context of aesthetics or the theory of beauty. One of criticism's goals is the pursuit of a rational basis for art appreciation.

The variety of artistic movements has resulted in a division of art criticism into different disciplines, each using vastly different criteria for their judgements. The most common division in the field of criticism is between historical criticism and evaluation, a form of art history, and contemporary criticism of work by living artists.

Despite perceptions that art criticism is a much lower risk activity than making art, opinions of current art are always liable to drastic corrections with the passage of time. Critics of the past are often ridiculed for either favoring artists now derided (like the academic painters of the late 19th Century) or dismissing artists now venerated (like the early work of the Impressionists). Some art movements themselves were named disparagingly by critics, with the name later adopted as a sort of badge of honor by the artists of the style (e.g. Impressionism, Cubism), the original negative meaning forgotten.

are unable to adapt to new movements in art and allow their opinions to override their objectivity, resulting in inappropriately dated critique. John Ruskin famously compared one of James McNeill Whistler's paintings, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, to "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face".

Artists have often had an uneasy relationship with their critics. Artists usually need positive opinions from critics for their work to be viewed and purchased; unfortunately for the artists, only later generations may understand it.

hm...

I laughed when I read that article from the Guardian about whether or not critics have any influence over the art world. It reminded me of Sewell and that piece I wrote in which I said his angry remarks about certain artists were 'largely ineffective'.
So is it true? Do art critics no longer make a difference? I think they still do, just not in the way the article talks about. They can act as an aid to the public in understanding what they are looking at when faced with art. Not only that, but of course they help people decide which exhibition to go and see. They just have no influence over what is shown or bought, that is the job of the curator and buyer.
There's no crisis, surely things are as they have been for some time now? Though I doubt very much Brian Sewell is happy being considered 'pointless' when that's what he's based his career on..

Latest Publications (02/05/08)

Hang it all – they've hidden everything

Some years ago, angered by a particularly meagre annual re-hang of Tate Britain, sponsored by BP, I stood at its door and asked 100 visitors, on the point of leaving, two simple questions. How long, deducting time spent in the café and the cloakroom, have you spent in the gallery? And how long did you expect to spend? To the second the answers varied from a couple of hours to a full day. To the first the average was 45 minutes. That was a year when fewer than 500 exhibits were on view, many of them absorbed and understood at the first glance, many not even worthy of that one glance. Since then the re-hangs have been a little more substantial, but this year the offering again seems wretchedly thin and again I am inclined to question whether this annual merry-go-round is of any value to the public.

To BP, of course, it is of inestimable value, for its arts sponsorship, generous though it may seem, is entirely for its own advantage, not for the benefit of the sponsored institutions. As a judge on the BP Portrait Award a year or two ago I was disgusted by the manipulations and demands of the judge representing BP in the interest of the firm's advertising and perceived political correctitude, and I wonder what part these may play in the choices made by the Tate's curators in re-hanging. Whatever the case, we shall see in all sorts of quarters over the next few months the gallery's paintings (ours) reproduced as advertisements for BP, the texts discreetly casuist to prove that the firm that fills our petrol tanks also nourishes our cultural stomachs and aesthetic souls.

My argument against the annual re-hang is not, however, primarily against the uses BP may make of it for its crude commercial purposes — for I am Jesuitical enough to recognise that an end may justify a means — but that in this case the end is not worthwhile. Tate Britain owns some masterpieces and other works that are of national and international interest; these are few enough always to be on view for the benefit of visitors from Manchester and Moscow, and on view they should be. The merry-go-round demands that they are not. “All change” is the curator's cry, and they disappear, to be replaced by trivia. A whole room this year is devoted to the British response to collage — trivia indeed. A whole room is devoted to Robyn Denny, a slight and meretricious painter, now of well-deserved obscurity; perhaps in some too diligent survey of the Sixties or Seventies it might just be worth exhuming him, but to so expose him to solitary scrutiny is cruel to him and tedious to the passer-by.

If we turn to 18th-century British paintings then it is at once obvious that the National Gallery, not the Tate, has far the finer things on view — the greatest Stubbs, the most Enlightened Wright, the magnificently precocious Lawrence, the best of Hogarth's narratives, the most noble and naive of Gainsboroughs, and portraits by Reynolds that avoid all the pitfalls into which he so often tumbled. All these are bravely the equal of their European peers but in the Tate, such painters are reduced to the hapless backwater level so vociferously damned by Roger Fry.

In the new hang the 19th century does reasonably well, the pictures comfortably close without the pretentious acres of bare wall that make the hang so thin in other rooms — but has Tate Britain the finest selections of Pre-Raphaelites and Olympian Victorians? As for the 20th century, this year it hardly tells the tale at all — a handful of Bacons (the Dog of 1952 is marvellous), another of Burras, a homage to Pasmore, and photographs of a skewbald Fiat 500 by Simon Starling.

With such meagre stuff we have another year of the 45-minute scamper. And one last point — the gallery really should get its lighting in order. To have blazing glare in one room and Stygian gloom in the next (for no obvious conservation reason) makes no sense to the visitor compelled to squint and peer.

Latest Publication (02/05/08)

Can you see anything wrong with this picture?

What is in effect the National Gallery of Puerto Rico is closed for renovation. This startling information must be of little interest in London, but for the advantage taken of it by Tate Britain which, for some months, is to offer refuge to two of the gallery's most important British pictures, Lord Leighton's Flaming June and The Sleep of Arthur at Avalon by Edward Burne-Jones. Flaming June has some claim to be the picture that reversed public distaste for High Victorian art in the mid and later Sixties, and Arthur at Avalon has been described by the director of Tate Britain as its painter's “last and greatest work”. Last it unarguably was, for Burne-Jones worked on it the day before his death on 17 June 1898, and the canvas still shows signs of unfinish, though his assistant, the loyal and attentive Thomas Rooke (never credited) must have tinkered it into saleable condition. The old boy's greatest work, it certainly was not: less of a composition than a stiff, stilted and staged tableau, it has nothing of the invention, energy and bravura of The Perseus Cycle with which it overlapped; nevertheless, it is worth more than a passing glance. More than six metres wide and nearly three high, initiated in 1881 as a commission for the library of Haworth Castle, the home of the painter's friend, George Howard, this vast canvas was to be for Burne-Jones what Parsifal — which took twice as long to complete and was also a last work — was to Wagner: a too personal, spiritual and emotional exploration of himself and a romantic mythological past with which he identified himself to the extent of self-portraiture as Arthur. It is sentimental, anguished and morbid; it reeks with the odour of sanctity; and just as a recent critic described Parsifal as “a bit of a pill … staggeringly pretentious”, so the sane man might say of this picture. It underwent more significant re-composing than even Picasso's Guernica, and became the ageing painter's obsession so much so that Howard released him from the commission so that Burne-Jones could paint it for himself without constraint.

“I'm not in good spirits about Avalon,” said the old boy to Rooke in 1897, exactly a year before his death, “it might turn out no more than a piece of decoration with no meaning in it at all, and what's the good of that? I shall have to … go at it with more fury.” But then, within weeks of the first brushstroke in 1881, he had asked himself: “Why did I begin it?” Two months before his fatal heart attack he complained that he must finish it without any expectation of a sale; and one month later he demanded larger brushes, “thumpers and whack-ers”, so that he could paint faster. And still he did not finish it.

In the winter after his death, Arthur at Avalon was first seen by the public in a memorial exhibition. It was subsequently sold to Charles Goldman, a collector who in 1929 offered to sell it to the Tate; when the offer was refused, he lent it instead. There it was last exhibited in 1933, the centenary of the painter's birth. It remained on loan until April 1962, but at some point, probably in August 1939 when the Tate evacuated its paintings in preparation for the Second World War, it was removed from its stretcher, rolled, and put into a stout box some half-metre square and three metres long. In that it stayed undisturbed until 1963, when Goldman's heirs consigned it to Christie's, where I was then working, for inclusion in a sale by auction on Friday 26 April.

The box containing the canvas was not delivered until the previous Friday, 19 April. From a small black and white photograph I had to concoct a cata logue entry for a picture that no one had seen for 30 years and that played no part in the then available literature; it was thus with particular interest that I watched its arrival in the lofty anteroom, the unscrewing of the lid and the myriad spiders that scuttled from the box. The vast canvas was then gently unrolled on the floor, obstinate in its curvature, and the mass of webs and other arachnid detritus removed from it. How could we display so large a canvas without a stretcher? As a tapestry on a tapestry bar, I decided, but not one in the house was six metres long and another had to be procured. With the canvas tacked to it by the raw edge that had formerly folded over the original stretcher, it was hauled up the wall with a dozen of us supporting it to ensure that the inevitable inverted curvature was kept as open as possible. It worked. The canvas, however, was much weightier than any tapestry.

Christie's chairman, Peter Chance, then came in to see the masterpiece. Demure, a pink and silver man, short, stout and erect, he strode to its very centre and within a pace of it; at that moment the weight of the canvas began to tear it from the bar. Poor Peter reached to press it against the wall, but the avalanche could not be stopped, the canvas ripped away, curled forward and enclosed him in its vastness. Instead of standing still, he panicked, fought his way out of the belly of this whale, dishevelled, and the canvas lay face down, a crumpled heap.

The one thing that must never be done with a painted canvas is to roll it face in, but that is more or less what happened in its fall. When we reversed it and flattened it we saw the consequences — flaked paint lay thickly on the floor, the whole width of the canvas where flowers fill the foreground, the area of heaviest initial impact, was extensively damaged, and the widespread random damages elsewhere reflected the chair-man's efforts to escape.

I called Joan Seddon, old friend and Courtauld Institute contemporary, a distinguished conservator of paintings then working on the restoration of Mantegna's Triumphs at Hampton Court. We had until 9am on Monday morning, when the picture was officially on view — some 30 working hours, we thought — in which to camouflage the damages. Lying on cushions on the canvas Joan began work at the top, and I, on my knees, began at the bottom on the easier business of repairing the crudely painted flowers. Thirty hours were not enough and we worked through the night on Sunday.

During the week of the sale not a word was said by anyone. Did no one notice how much of Arthur at Avalon had been damaged? And if they did, did they assume that the damages were old? When the painting was bought by the museum in Puerto Rico, it was relined, cleaned and stretched before being framed and installed in a specially constructed room —- did none of the experts responsible for these procedures not notice how much of the paint was new? Or were all the damages stripped and re-restored without a word to the new owner? Looking at the painting now, 45 years later almost to the day, under the uneven glister of a patchy varnish, I could identify very few of Joan's interventions, but was appalled by the crude quality of the irises, blue-bells and forget-me-nots —- is any one of them by Burne-Jones himself, or are they all by one of the 20 assistants he once had, by Thomas Rooke, by me and subsequent restorers?

Tate Britain (020 7887 8008; www.tate.org.uk) is open daily, 10am-5.50pm, and until 10pm on the first Friday of each month. Admission free