Legendary art critic Brian Sewell remembered at memorial

Friends, colleagues and loyal readers were at St James's Church in Piccadilly yesterday to say a final farewell to the late Brian Sewell, the Evening Standard’s art critic for more than three decades. Attendees included author Jilly Cooper, Earl Spencer, artist Maggi Hambling and journalist Geordie Greig, who gave a reading of Ozymandias. Eulogies were given by Noel Annesley of Christie’s, and former Evening Standard editor Sir Max Hastings, who shared his fond memories of one of the country's most loved journalists:

"Many of us in my disreputable trade are journalists because we discovered at an early age that we were incapable of doing anything else. Brian, by contrast, stumbled into the career that made him a star when almost 50, first talent-spotted for Tatler by Tina Brown, then in 1984 poached by the Evening Standard, to which he contributed for the rest of his days. He possessed the gifts of all successful polemicists: conceit; passion; wit; literary elegance; an instinctive suspicion of and disdain for power and wealth. He added to these an assured understanding of how far he might reasonably go…before promptly taking two steps further. His prose resembled a magnificent baroque church, laden with sentences of a weight and ornateness that defied gravity, and paragraphs which sometimes continued into next week.

He was as extravagant in his hatreds as in his loves. Connoisseurs of journalistic violence flocked to read Brian in the spirit that once lured audiences to the Roman Colosseum. They savoured the hideous wounds he inflicted on the likes of Andy Warhol and Lucien Freud- who, he said, ‘allowed his paintbrush to crawl into a woman’s crotch with the insistence of a caterpillar into a cabbage plant’. Then there was the shark man, of whom he wrote: ‘it helps to look at Damian Hirst less as an artist than as a manufacturer of extravagant goods desirable to footballers’ wives and cupiditous collectors governed by envy and social inferiority rather than connoisseurship’. If you have never previously heard the adjective cupiditous, nor has Chambers’ dictionary.

Every successive editor of the Evening Standard embraced Brian as one of the newspaper’s most brilliant and indeed bankable stars- among very few whom we knew that readers would buy the paper for. I had no trouble telling Brian how much I adored his work, because I really did. Maybe our relationship also benefited from the fact that I shared most of his views about art, and especially contemporary art, albeit from an incomparably less informed perspective. When he wrote that ‘to own a Hirst is to tell the world that your bathroom taps are gilded and your Rolls-Royce is pink’, I rejoiced along with hundreds of thousands of other readers because his abuse was not merely witty- it also seemed deliciously true. He said of Berthe Morisot: ‘Noone would have taken the smallest notice of her work if she had been called Bert Morisot’.

I shared Brian’s conviction that The Wind In the Willows is a masterpiece, while Winnie the Pooh is sentimental tosh for sissies. ‘As a child’, he wrote, ‘I learned a fundamental element of style- that prose can be as poetic as poetry and is not just the crude stuff of ripping yarns’. This discovery he attributed to Ratty and Mol

It was a delight to see Brian give full play to an enthusiasm. One evening we persuaded Neil MacGregor to hold a small dinner in his honour at the National Gallery, and afterwards Brian took us to view two of his best beloved Old Masters, about which he talked as if inspired, which indeed he was. The Hastingses, and I suspect all the others of his little audience, found the experience a revelation: the eloquence, wisdom, and above all passion with which he spoke opened our eyes to those paintings in a fashion which made us blush at our previous blindness, and marvel at Brian’s piercing insight.

Intelligent egoists and exhibitionists, which includes most people who work in the media and many who work in the art world, know themselves for what they are. Brian did. He privily acknowledged the extravagance of his views on many subjects, though that did not diminish the sincerity with which he held them. He loathed nearly all politicians, together with most manifestations of modern technology save motor cars, to which his attitude resembled that of Mr.Toad. To the end of his days he refused to compose copy on anything save a typewriter. He once held forth to colleagues at nearby desks on this subject, saying: ‘I can carve words out of wood or chisel them in stone, but I cannot present them on a screen’. His kindness and courtesy to sub-editors whom he respected, and especially towards Marianne the Standard’s arts department researcher, was matched by his capacity for outbursts of frenzied rage towards others, including editors, who dared to change a comma or question his judgement. Nobody could have called Brian an easy man, except by his own account during his periodic sexual rampages, but during 16 years of running newspapers I came to believe that hardly any journalist who is readily managed is much cop at what they do.

Because I met Brian as a writer rather than as a friend, I knew little about his personal life, but it was not hard to guess that he found contentment elusive, save in the company of his beloved dogs. ‘The dog’ he wrote, ‘offers considerable advantages over the wife, the mistress, the toy-boy and the paramour; you do not have to take him out to lunch or dinner, conspire to be away for long weekends, share a bank account with him or settle outrageous bills run up on credit cards. He never cares how you look first thing in the morning, does not look aghast at belch or fart, nor does he grumble if you choose not to shave’.

One sometimes glimpsed Brian at moments of fierce joy, when his eyes glittered, his lip quivered in glee at the success of a joke, or praise for a column that had especially enraged Norman Rosenthal at the Royal Academy. Yet most of us, even if in youth and middle life we enjoyed braving ocean tempests, in old age want to find repose in an island of calm. Brian never discovered such a refuge. To mix metaphors, maybe part of the price one pays for being such a professionally angry man is that it becomes hard to achieve tranquillity when the stage lights go down and the greasepaint comes off.

The aspect of Brian’s writing that I found least easy to sympathise with, yet was very much part of his make-up, was a savage sexual explicitness. Even though this afternoon I have sought to push the boundaries of expression at least half as far as Brian did, because I feel that is what he would have wished, I will not quote his observations on his own family life, such as it was. Oscar Wilde famously wrote that we first love our parents, then judge them and sometimes finally forgive them. Brian never attained the last stasis. He described himself as ‘burdened by moral baggage’, and wrote much about the reasons for this.

Noel Annesley has this afternoon spoken vividly about Brian as a friend and colleague in the world of art. I can claim to represent only his admirers in journalism, his second profession. He inspired both love and hate, never indifference. He was a consummate entertainer, at his best in print, but no mean performer on screen, so long as it was on his own terms, which did not include his appearances on Have I Got News For You. As his editor, I revelled in his talent and the fun of his company, while also recognising his huge vulnerability. When I left the paper, he gave me a Victorian watercolour which makes me think of him whenever I pass it on the wall. This was accompanied by a note which was terse, witty and generous. Here was one of a host of kindnesses which explain why Brian was so much appreciated by many of those who lived and worked with him, as he was also by millions of readers, who saw in his view of art a vigorous, sometimes ferocious, common sense, alongside a wondrous eye for beauty, which made him the most famous as well as the most controversial art critic of his time.

Brian was never boring. He once said defiantly: ‘I try to stand apart. Nothing matters more than intellectual probity. The critic must be prepared to sacrifice even his closest friends’. There was an almost masochistic element in his mania for rows, and in the price he paid for this in his relationships. Yet I fancy dear Brian might be content to paraphrase Hilaire Belloc for his own epitaph: his sins were scarlet, but his columns were read."

Farewell Brian.