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 As ever in his review of Susan Hiller ‘feminism’ is taken to be a wrong-headed and outdated phase, rather than a serious belief, approach or political stance.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 # 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 # 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 #9: weirdest simile ever

‘The press has been ecstatic over this first stage of what the museum calls its “Future Plan Transformation”; like dogs rolling in fox droppings, they rolled in hyperbole, declaring the display spectacular, heaving with luxury, the objects ravishing, glowing, opulent, unrivalled…’

Brian Sewel, ‘http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23795201-antique-roadshow-at-v-and-as-medieval-and-renaissance-galleries.do’, The Evening Standard, 14 January 2010

Read more: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23795201-antique-roadshow-at-v-and-as-medieval-and-renaissance-galleries.do

AW: I just don’t get it. How is it like dogs rolling in fox droppings?

Sewellisms #8: Sexist Sewell

‘In the old wing of the National Gallery until well past Ash Wednesday The Hoerengracht by Edward Kienholz is on view, an installation mimicking a notorious street in the red-light quarter of Amsterdam. Exquisite in detail, it is an evidently melancholy contemplation of the means by which the loveless lust from which all men suffer can be sated if they dare.’

Brian Sewell, ‘The Great Gallery Gallop’, Evening Standard, 17.12.09
Read more: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/article-23785400-the-great-gallery-gallop.do

AW: How phallocentric is that? Trust Sewell to see Kienholz’s red light district installation as expressing male desire rather than female enslavement. Typically he has ignored the role that his wife and collaborator, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, had in the project; a working relationship that he belittled last year in his review of the show: ‘I put her down as assistant producer rather than co-director, for the concept seems wholly his’ (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23771736-truth-about-the-sex-trade-from-edward-kienholz.do).

Incidentally, ‘A Rising Gale’, illustrated in the article, is of course by Van de Velde, not Turner as stated, although the latter responded to it in his pendent, ‘Dutch Boats in a Gale’ (The Bridgewater Sea Piece). It is in a private collection not Tate Britain, though it is on show there at the moment.

Sewellisms #7: Sexism

Brian Sewell used his recent Evening Standard column to discuss the ‘art books of the year’. As you’d expect from the subject, Sewell devotes most of the article to summing up some of the major contributions, adding a little critical appraisal or appreciation here and there, avoiding references to male body parts, and making only the briefest allusion to sex and masturbation. My only reservation would be that most of the books are well beyond the means of the majority of libraries, let along readers (we’re talking: £40 - £395, hardly stocking-fillers).

But then he comes to the women authors and artists, and the tone changes.

First he criticises Professor Susan Siegfried (Ingres: Painting Reimagined) for ‘turning to her role as Professor of Women’s Studies’, and her ‘tiresome hints of feminism’, before directing his wrath to Ulrike Müller and Ruth Hemus (Bauhaus Women; Dada’s Women) for lending ‘even more grist to the feminist’s mill.’

They’re main crime, however, is not that they use their scholarly expertise to write about art, but that they suggest that women artists are the equal of men: ‘Neither considers the possibility that women were perhaps not as inventive as men, always following, not leading’. Sewell then claims that these books ‘are published only because their subjects are women’, who he regards as ‘the forgettable second rank’.

He seems shocked that the artist Leonor Fini (1908-1996), should have been ‘wrongly claimed as a feminist - and even as a lesbian’, though he praises her depiction of men for ‘often achieving homo-erotic intensity’.

Me: Dear Father Christmas, I have been a good boy this year, please may I have a £400 book about a male artist by a man.

Santa: Sorry son. A little birdy told me that you have been a naughty boy, so it’s a £30 book on women artists by a woman. Now go away and think about what you’ve done!

J.M.W. Turnon Brian Sewell, ‘Art Books of the Year’, 10 December 2009, The Evening Standard http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/article-23782184-art-books-of-the-year.do