Brian Sewell

Brian Alfred Christopher Bushell Sewell (15 July 1931 – 19 September 2015) was an English art critic.

He wrote for the Evening Standard and had an acerbic view of conceptual art and the Turner Prize.

The Guardian described him as "Britain's most famous and controversial art critic", while the Standard called him the "nation’s best art critic".

Sewell was born on 15 July 1931, in Hammersmith, London, taking his mother's surname, Perkins.

The man who in later life he claimed was his father, composer Philip Heseltine, better known as Peter Warlock, died of coal gas poisoning seven months before Sewell was born.

Brian was brought up in Kensington, west London, and elsewhere by his mother, Mary Jessica Perkins, who married Robert Sewell in 1936.

He was educated at the private Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School in Hampstead, northwest London.

Offered a place to read history at Oxford, Sewell instead chose to enter the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, where his tutors included Anthony Blunt, who became his close friend.

Sewell graduated in 1957 and worked at Christie's auction house, specialising in Old Master paintings and drawings.

After leaving Christie's he became an art dealer.

He completed his National Service as a commissioned officer in the Royal Army Service Corps.

"There was a time in the 1970s when I thought him one of the best draughtsmen of the 20th century, wonderfully skilful, observant, subtle, sympathetic, spare, every touch of pencil, pen or crayon essential to the evocation of the subject, whether it be a portrait or light flooding a sparse room; nothing has made me change that view, but Hockney has tried very hard...Hockney is not another Turner expressing, in high seriousness, his debt to the old master; Hockney is not another Picasso teasing Velázquez and Delacroix with not quite enough wit; here Hockney is a vulgar prankster, trivialising not only a painting that he is incapable of understanding and could never execute but in involving him in the various parodies, demeaning Picasso too."

Sewell was also known for his disdain for Damien Hirst, describing him as "fucking dreadful".

In 1979, after Blunt's exposure as the fourth man in the Cambridge spy ring, gaining much media attention, Sewell assisted in sheltering him in Chiswick.

Following the Blunt affair, Sewell was hired as art critic for Tina Brown's revitalised Tatler magazine.

In 1984, he replaced the avant-garde critic Richard Cork as art critic for the Evening Standard.

He won press awards including Critic of the Year (1988), Arts Journalist of the Year (1994), the Hawthornden Prize for Art Criticism (1995) and the Foreign Press Award (Arts) in 2000.

Although Sewell appeared on BBC Radio 4 in the early 1990s, it was not until the late 1990s that he became a household figure through his appearances on television.

He was known for his formal, old-fashioned RP diction and for his anti-populist sentiments.

He offended people in Gateshead by claiming an exhibition was too important to be held at the town's Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and should instead be shown to "more sophisticated" audiences in London.

He also disparaged Liverpool as a cultural city.

In 1994 thirty-five figures from the art world signed a letter to the Evening Standard attacking Sewell for "homophobia", "misogyny", "demagogy", "hypocrisy", "artistic prejudice", "formulaic insults" and "predictable scurrility".

Signatories included Karsten Schubert, Maureen Paley, Michael Craig-Martin, Christopher Frayling, John Hoyland, Sarah Kent, Nicholas Logsdail, George Melly, Sandy Nairne, Eduardo Paolozzi, Bridget Riley, Richard Shone, Marina Warner, Natalie Wheen and Rachel Whiteread.

Sewell responded with comments about many of the signatories, describing Paley as being "the curatrix of innumerable silly little Arts Council exhibitions" and describing Whiteread as being "mortified by my dismissal of her work for the Turner Prize".

A letter supporting Sewell from twenty other art-world signatories accused the writers of attempted censorship to promote "a relentless programme of neo-conceptual art in all the main London venues".

Sewell suggested that art world insiders had felt embarrassed by a recent TV stunt in which he, a dealer and another critic had been shown a painting without being told that it had been painted by an elephant.

Sewell described the painting as having no merit, while the other participants praised it.

Sewell's attitude toward female artists was controversial.

In April 2003, he was awarded the Orwell Prize for his Evening Standard column.

In criticisms of the Tate Gallery's art, he coined the term "Serota tendency" after its director Nicholas Serota.

In 2003, Sewell made a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in a documentary called The Naked Pilgrim, produced by Wag TV for Channel 5.

He took LSD as a young man, describing it in 2007 as a drug "for people of my age. It's wonderful. The one thing you could not do, however, was drip it into your eyeballs. It sent you absolutely bonkers."

In July 2008, he was quoted in The Independent as saying:"The art market is not sexist. The likes of Bridget Riley and Louise Bourgeois are of the second and third rank. There has never been a first-rank woman artist. Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness. Women make up 50 per cent or more of classes at art school. Yet they fade away in their late 20s or 30s. Maybe it's something to do with bearing children."

In his review of Hirst's 2012 show at Tate Modern, Sewell said "To own a Hirst is to tell the world that your bathroom taps are gilded and your Rolls-Royce is pink" adding, "Put bluntly, this man’s imagination is quite as dead as all the dead creatures here suspended in formaldehyde."

Despite being attacked in his 2013 memoirs, Veronica Wadley, the editor of the Standard between 2002 and 2009, defended Sewell and said she had defended him from management and arts' lobbyists who wanted him sacked.

Sewell was strongly opinionated and was known to insult the general public for their views on art.

With regard to public praise for the work of Banksy in Bristol, he was quoted as saying:"The public doesn't know good from bad. For this city to be guided by the opinion of people who don't know anything about art is lunacy. It doesn't matter if they [the public] like it."

He went on to assert that Banksy himself "should have been put down at birth."

Media personality Clive Anderson described him as "a man intent on keeping his Christmas card list nice and short."

In an Evening Standard review, Sewell summed up his view of the David Hockney: A Bigger Picture exhibition at the Royal Academy, as concluding that Hockney had made a mistake focusing on painting in his later career: