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 As ever in his review of Susan Hiller ‘feminism’ is taken to be a wrong-headed and outdated phase, rather than a serious belief, approach or political stance.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 # 21: Ultimate put down

Born in 1946, Jamie is unashamedly a borrower, a crass incompetent incapable of drawing and able to paint only in the idiom of either father or grandfather — corny is the word that comes to mind, closely followed by naive, stale, uncomprehending, vulgar and inane. At his inept attempt to portray Nureyev as a dancer waiting in the wings, mocking laughter is the only reasonable response. As for his September 11, no patriotic blindness can excuse the dim-witted dumb banality of this pondered response to that dreadful day in 2001

• Brian Sewell, ‘Different strokes from Andrew Wyeth’, Evening standard, 15 July 2010, <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23856446-different-strokes-from-andrew-wyeth.do>.

AW: Ouch!

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 # 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 #12: more willies

‘Two elements among these figures have defied explanation […]. One is a small penis, erect at 45 degrees, the other a much larger tumescent penis, horizontal, in an alien masturbating right hand, the thumb towards the root; neither is attached to a body and both are far larger in scale than the neighbouring figures. […] And what are we to think of Michelangelo, fumbling in his trousers as he drew these phalluses […]?’

Brian Sewell, ‘Michaelangelo and his boy’, The evening Standard, 18 February 2010

Read more: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/article-23807304-michelangelo-and-his-boy.do

Sewellisms #11: ‘My cock’s bigger than your cock’

‘What then happened in the auction room? Put very simply, two rich bidders fought the “my cock’s bigger than yours” battle for a status symbol until sanity whispered in the ear of one that he had gone too far and he dropped out.’

Brian Sewell, ‘The status symbol that commanded a king’s ransom’, 5 February 2010

Read more: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23802781-the-status-symbol-that-commanded-a-kings-ransom.do

AW: Its for quotes like this that ‘Sewellisms’ was initiated on this blog. More of this please Brian, and less of your recent offensiveness (see Sewellisms 7, 8 and 10).