Art Wank

Sewellisms # 23: Cliché counter

1 panjandrums

1 jabberwocky

1 piffle

3 feminist

1 feminism

• Brian Sewell, ‘Away with the fairies with Susan Hiller’, Evening Standard, 3 February 2011, <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23920219-away-with-the-fairies-with-susan-hiller.do>.

AW: Sometime I think he puts in the Sewellisms and then writes the article around them. As ever in his review of Susan Hiller ‘feminism’ is taken to be a wrong-headed and outdated phase, rather than a serious belief, approach or political stance.

Sewellisms # 22: Muybridge

Had Muybridge been able to record the movements of Lady Hamilton’s Attitudes we might have understood the erotic charge that so fascinated Nelson and led to his seduction, but for this his ingenious camera was a long half-century too late.

• Brian Sewell, ‘Motion Pictures from Edward Muybridge’, The Evening Standard, 9 September 2010, <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23876025-motion-pictures-from-eadweard-muybridge.do>

AW: Where did that come from?

Sewellisms # 20: Pricks, dicks, bums and bosoms

The pricks, dicks, bums and bosoms of the saucy postcard mingle with the riotous rumpy-pumpy episodes of Rowlandson; the silken elegance of Beardsley’s tumescent penises puts to shame Grayson Perry’s monstrous strutting phalluses, veinous with over-use, masquerading as Hans Andersen.

• Brian Sewell, ‘A stick of rock, cock? Tate Britain gets smutty’, The Evening Standard, 24 June 2010, <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23848885-a-stick-of-rock-cock-tate-britain-gets-smutty.do>.

AW: Right, we’re there!

p.s. don’t anyone tell my female co-editor about Sewell’s summation of Sarah Lucas’s piece as ‘the wanking forearm, for example — surely an expression of feminist envy’. Ouch!

Sewellisms # 19: Bronzed Bodies

‘nude women bathed, nude boys drew swords from scabbards, and nude Nubians stood guard. The small bronze was, it seems, a genre of art in which the nude, male and female, could abandon modesty and its futile wisps of drapery and stand full frontal at eye-level on the mantelpiece.’

‘it is at its best with nude male figures, either singly or performing some ghastly ritual of death or torment on some other male.’

• Brian Sewell, ‘Beautiful Bronzes from Ancient Rome’, Evening Standard, 27 May 2010, <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23839088-beautiful-bronzes-from-ancient-rome.do>

AW:  Sewell really brings to life the beauty of boys bronzes.

Sewellisms #18: Pseuds, panjandrums and penises

I fell to wondering what French critics have made of it, but long ago, translating for the Arts Council, I learned that French art criticism is what David Lee, editor of Jackdaw, might dub high octane artbollocks — the self-indulgent blethering of pseuds in the obscure jabberwocky that has developed among cod-philosophers who pretend an interest in art.

• Brian Sewell, ‘Ooh la la, Freud!’, The Evening Standard, 20 May 2010, <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23836139-ooh-la-la-freud.do>

AW: Thanks, we like that Brian. Though the phrase ‘takes one to know one’ springs to mind. This was a great week for Sewellisms. As well as throwing a ‘panjandrums’ in there (one day I’m gonna count them up, I’m guessing he says it every other week), there is a classic Sewell dissertation on naughty bits:

Occasionally they stand for a moment, but only to pursue some genital enquiry, as with the almost life-size awkwardly recumbent Leigh Bowery (Nude with Leg Up) whose largely tumescent penis is pretty well dead centre in a canvas seven feet wide — for Freud is nothing if not thorough in his depiction of the penis, testicles and cunt.

Sewellisms # 17: On drawing

‘it is in drawing that the sperm penetrates the egg, so to speak, and the conception of a work of art begins (it is tempting to suppose that pen, pencil and penis come from the same root, but they do not)’

• Brian Sewell, ‘Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings’, Evening Standard, 22 April 2010, <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23827227-italian-renaissance-drawings-on-display-at-british-museum.do>.

AW:  Phallocentric much?

On Botticelli’s Allegory of Abundance:

‘Her movement thrusts the diaphanous stuff of her dress against her legs and into her crotch but above it is bundled as wrapping for a belly, waist and breasts that, strung about with tapes, seem far less real than those of Pollaiuolo’s Eve — are they invention, rather than observation, welded to the figure of a boy? Can she have been, with her face and feet, a boy? Perhaps a rather bewildered boy, slack-jawed and open-mouthed.’

AW: Hmm. Fantasising much?

Sewellisms # 16: The Prince and the Pudding

In his review of ‘Victoria and Albert: Art and Love’ at the Queens Gallery, Brian Sewell continues to criticise the appearance of British queens. Having described Lady Jane Grey as ‘plain Jane’ last week in his review of the Delaroche exhibition at the National Gallery, he now turns to Queen Victoria, taking up a position of sympathy with Prince Albert, who he speculates must have been a long suffering man to put up with a ‘pudding’ like Queen Vic.

She is described as…

‘a woman of utmost plainness […] with goitrous eyes to boot, retreating chin and teeth a trifle prominent’, [while Albert is a] ‘tall and handsome German princeling’.

Sewell finds it impossible to imagine that Albert could have loved Victoria as they grew older, asking…

‘could he, if ever he enjoyed their conjugations, still relish playing stallion to this plain pudding of a woman now that they were verging on their forties?’

…and can only conclude, in his typically misogynistic fashion, that she loved him, while he could not have:

‘Whatever the mature Albert thought of Victoria in a court crowded with notably prettier women, there can be no doubt that she demandingly adored him, perhaps to the point of close-focused nymphomania.’

Sewell seems astonished that there is no evidence to suggest that Albert was unfaithful, asking:

‘Was he so seduced by the deceitful improvements to Victoria’s features introduced by [artists] Winterhalter and his peers that he never saw her as she really was? Was he never tempted to taste tart instead of pudding?’

Obviously the hideous troll would be too much for any red blooded male to bear. And only one conclusion is possible. Albert submitted to a trifling bit of typhoid to get away from her:

‘Were the restraints imposed by her exhausting demands, physical, emotional and (it is whispered) sexual (there was no driving need for them to enrich most of the dynastic bloodlines of Europe with their Saxe-Coburg-Gotha genes), so dire that at 42, when typhoid took him to his grave, he had lost the will to live?’

Sewell cannot conceive of a successful relationship where the woman is more prominent, and so Albert’s life is characterised as a drudge:

‘Albert was trapped and caged by married life; Victoria was inescapable […] as the years wore on he became, in effect, her private and public secretary and a slave to affairs of state and family.’

But all of this is of course a prelude to what I suspect is the real thrust of Sewell’s argument:

‘That with his death her patronage of the arts fell away to nothing suggests that these were much more his interest than hers.’

All the Victorian era’s achievements in terms of patronage and stimulation of the arts are therefore due to the ‘educated’ husband, while the wife ‘commissioned their portraits by the dozen’ because she could not bear to be out of reach of him.

• Brian Sewell, ‘Beauty of the Beast in Victoria and Albert Exhibition’, The Evening Standard, 25 March 2010, < http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23819077-beauty-of-the-beast-in-victoria-and-albert-exhibition.do>

Sewellisms # 15: Lady Jane fails to interest doubting John Thomas

‘Jane Grey has always left me cold and does so still. […] I can only suppose that the modern public has fallen sentimentally for a Plain Jane in a wedding dress confronted with a rather worse predicament than being jilted at the altar.’

• Brian Sewell, ‘Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey’, The Evening Standard, 18 March 2010. <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23816725-delaroche-paints-plain-jane.do>

AW: Brian Sewell just can’t let the public enjoy something without calling them idiots. We think you’re wrong Brian. Jane’s not plain, she’s hot!

Sewellisms # 14: Self-professed ignorance

‘I knew nothing of the Kingdom of Ife in what is now Western Nigeria, until the British Museum’s catalogue of its new exhibition under that title dropped onto my doormat.’

Brian Sewell, ‘The Kingdom of Ife: Sculptures from West Africa’, 11 March 2010

Read more: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23814446-heads-of-africa-on-show-at-the-kingdom-of-ife.do

AW: What! I though every first year Courtauld undergraduate had a basic knowledge of eleventh-century West African sculpture! Frankly I was rather taken aback to read Brian Sewell admitting ignorance on any subject. At least until he made his defence in the next sentence; simultaneously showing off his classical education while taking a side swipe at a dead celebrity:

‘it is not quite the same as knowing nothing about Michelangelo, Rembrandt  and Velázquez and the whereabouts of Rome, Amsterdam  and Madrid  (though that appalling level of ignorance now seems the not uncommon consequence of an education system that produced Jade Goody and her ilk)’

Sewellisms #13: More, More, Moore

‘Reclining Figure of 1931 […] could perhaps be interpreted as a female figure in thrusting ecstatic anticipation of entry by a penis.’

Brian Sewell, ‘Does Henry Moore deserve his monumental reputation?’, Evening Standard, 25 February 2010