As the author of the “naive” letter by “art world types” published in the Evening Standard in January 1994 objecting to Brian Sewell’s attitude to contemporary art, I’d like to clarify why the letter was written (Brian Sewell was Mr Punch to modern art’s Judy, 21 September). Sewell, who proudly proclaimed that he was “neither liberal nor broad-minded”, was an art historian whose main area of expertise, honed in his years at Christie’s, was old master paintings, particularly 17th-century Dutch art. He was – equally proudly – deeply hostile to and ignorant about contemporary art, yet at the Evening Standard (where he had more space than any other critic on any other paper) he wrote lengthy reviews giving vent to his splenetic old-fogeyism, virulent homophobia (surprising, given his own homosexuality) and misogyny.
The review that prompted our protest was a 3,000-word diatribe, in Sewell’s overblown baroque prose (the first paragraph included the words cacafuego, eximious and ekphrasis), inveighing against a small exhibition at what is now Tate Britain entitled Writing on the Wall, of work by female artists (including Barbara Hepworth, Maggi Hambling, Mary Potter, Paula Rego), selected by female curators, the catalogue with contributions from female writers, poets, critics. Sewell dismissed it all as “a show defiled by feminist claptrap”, in particular a “frightful” female nude by Vanessa Bell that was so “ugly and incompetent, it could hardly be the favourite of even a purblind lesbian”.
The letter did not demand that Sewell be fired, as was erroneously claimed at the time. Stewart Steven, editor of the Standard, had told me that Sewell had been hired to be offensive without being libellous, that his work was deliberately targeted at the lowest common denominator: “Essex Man – the strap-hanger on the Ongar Line”. Since we recognised that “very occasionally, [Sewell] says something perceptive on subjects where he has some expertise”, we felt that London’s only evening paper should have two art critics: one for art dating from the early 1900s with its dreaded abstraction, and Sewell for what he called “traditional” art.
The 35 signatories – artists, art historians, writers, critics, curators, dealers – included Bridget Riley, Rachel Whiteread, Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, John Hoyland, Deanna Petherbridge, Susan Hiller, Michael Craig-Martin, Marina Warner (that year’s Reith lecturer), Sarah Kent, Paul Bailey, Bryan Robertson, Norbert Lynton, Richard Shone, Christopher Frayling, George Melly, René Gimpel, Angela Flowers and John Golding, the revered Courtauld Institute art historian and writer.
Perhaps Jonathan Jones was right to say that we were naive, but he’s wrong if he thinks that “Sewell really scared [us]”. What we objected to was his unapologetic and deliberate cruelty and viciousness, and that he was, in the words of your obituary (21 September), “puffed up”; like his invented Edwardian voice – and so many works of art – he was a fake. In the end though, as Jones notes, none of Sewell’s flailing at windmills stopped the inevitable triumph of contemporary art. Is Sewell turning in his bile-filled grave?
Susan Loppert
London
