25 August 2023

By Tim Koch

Tim Koch finds an aspect of rowing that he had previously been ignorant of. The article contains so many quotes, he feels that he should be called its curator, not its writer.

Most British readers will remember Brian Sewell, even those not usually interested in the esoteric musings of art critics. From the 1980s until his death in 2015, Sewell was often on television both as a critic and a personality. His withering put-downs of such as the Young British Artists and his anti-populist sentiments were loved by the public – but did not endear him to large sections of the art world. 

In 2012, Matthew Bell wrote in the Independent: 

Brian Sewell is the endlessly entertaining art critic who responds to bad shows by blowing the doors off the gallery, reversing his Daimler over the artist, and garnishing the wreckage with a freshly steaming dog turd. He is not one for half measures.

Sewell had a formal, old-fashioned genteel voice, sometimes described as “posher than the Queen” or “Lady Bracknell on acid”. He himself said that “I was cursed with the voice of an Edwardian lesbian.” In this accent, Sewell would use archaic words such as “lickspittle,” “panjandrum,” and “taradiddle.”

Sometimes, Sewell could produce waspish and witty quips. Of the modern artist, Damien Hirst, Sewell wrote: “To own a Hirst is to tell the world that your bathroom taps are gilded and your Rolls-Royce is pink.” On a new portrait of Queen Elizabeth II by Antony Williams he felt that: “She deserves better than to be perpetuated as an old-age pensioner about to lose her bungalow.”

It was not all wit: L.S. Lowry produced an “endless repetition of limited ideas,” Banksy “should have been put down at birth” and Tracey Emin was “ignorant, inarticulate, talentless, loutish and now very rich.”

Sewell loved to shock and name drop at the same time: onanism with Salvador Dalí, cannabis with Andy Warhol, LSD with important art dealers – though apparently only cigarettes with Princess Margaret and dancing with Guy Burgess.

Political correctness seemed to have passed Sewell by. He once said that an art exhibition due to be held in Gateshead in North East England should instead be shown to “more sophisticated” audiences in London. He was not a fan of female artists and claimed, “Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness.” 

It must be remembered that Sewell took pleasure in provocation. Amusing or shocking, it was always hard to tell whether he was genuine or simply adopting a persona. He confessed that, “Cats must occasionally be put among too comfortable pigeons.”

The Independent once wrote that Sewell “has almost achieved the status of national treasure, but (has) never succumbed to the temptation to be loveable.” Despite his popularity with the general public (“those who hasten from the Clapham Omnibus into the National Gallery”) the elitist Sewell did not think much of them claiming, “The public doesn’t know good (art) from bad.”

In 1994, his long-term employer, the London Evening Standard, published a letter signed by thirty-five figures from the art world accusing Sewell of a “dire mix of sexual and class hypocrisy, intellectual posturing and artistic prejudice”. A letter of support for Sewell from twenty other art-world signatories soon followed. One suspects that he enjoyed the controversy and two months later he won another of his many awards, the Press Awards Critic of the Year.

Those who knew Sewell said that the private man was actually kind and generous. Many suggested that a devout dog lover could not be all bad. The London Evening Standard wrote that he was often seen as “an unrelenting critic who took a sadistic pleasure in devouring anything he didn’t like. In truth, his work always contained sharp insight into the meaning and weight of the work he judged, whether or not he liked it.”

Sewell was diagnosed with cancer in 2014, a year before it killed him. His friend, Laura Freeman, observed that, “He responded to the disease with the disdain he usually reserved for an inferior Renaissance dauber or a second-rate exhibition.” 

Throughout his life, Sewell did not totally conform to the effete stereotype. He had been a good rugby player both at school and during his compulsory military service. He surprised himself by enjoying the army (he got a commission and even found the experience “beneficial”) but did not like his time at Haberdashers’ School (“a suburban horror pretending to be a public school”). He wrote about motoring for the Standard and was an unlikely fan of stock car racing. Sewell also wrote on politics and in 2003 won the prestigious political writing award, The Orwell Prize for Journalism.

More stereotypically, Sewell was gay. In his youth he had considered becoming a priest and, after a decade of chastity in the 1950s, he had asked God for “a sign” that his abstinence was the right thing. No divine guidance was forthcoming, so he proceeded to have sex with “thousands” of men in a variety of locations including the third-floor lavatories of Harrods, Chelsea Barracks, and the Victoria and Albert Museum (actually, any museum or art gallery was good). It was as if Sewell had given up the idea of an omnipresent God and replaced it with the idea of omnipresent sexual opportunities.

When he lived in Barnes (at the south end of Hammersmith Bridge) in the 1960s, Sewell frequented the towpath between Putney and Hammersmith after dark. It was a “notorious” and very popular area for casual and anonymous gay sex, often involving oarsmen who had just been “sculling or whatever it is that oarsmen do on the river.” 

However, in his memoirs, Sewell complained that rowers in flagrante were “always sheepishly passive, uncooperative in any foreplay, just wanting to be f- – – -d.” He hypothesised that this apparent failing was “something to do with the repetitive action of rowing, I suppose.” 

YouTube has a seven-minute interview with Sewell talking about the shortcomings of both oarsmen and Guardsmen as brief and anonymous paramours (policemen were better). He talks in a very amusing way (of course) but not even the upbeat and erudite Sewell can disguise the madness of having social or legal restraints on what consenting adults can do together. He begins and ends the clip talking about rowers. Clearly, he did not share the opinion of the fictitious Anthony Blanche who proclaimed, “All boatmen are Grace Darlings to me”.