‘I’ve been put to sea in a rudderless boat’
Dressed in pyjamas, dressing gown and ink-black cravat, Brian Sewell is seated in his south London study, closely guarded by his beloved dog, Lottie. Lottie adores Brian and Brian, Lottie. I suspect they are inseparable. Every time I move or lean towards Brian, she lets out a low, rumbling growl. ‘Don’t even think about it, mister,’ she glowers.
Brian, meanwhile, is telling me the story of the naughtiest (printable) thing he has ever done. He speaks slowly, softly, interrupting himself occasionally to offer me a cheese straw or a Cadbury chocolate finger.
It was the early 1960s when Sewell, now one of Britain’s best-known art critics, was working for Christie’s auction house. ‘I had to fly to Paris to see someone who wanted to sell an El Greco,’ he begins.
Sewell was to rendezvous with the contact for breakfast, but the man he met explained that the El Greco wasn’t his and that he’d have to meet a second man for lunch. ‘It wasn’t his painting either,’ Sewell explains, ‘and he told me that we’d have to meet yet another man for tea.
‘Anyway, eventually we had tea with this very young man who was extraordinarily beautiful – and who really did own the El Greco. It was a picture standing about two feet high, a preliminary sketch.’
It was likely worth a small fortune and the owner wanted Sewell to take it to London for sale. ‘But you can’t just walk out of a country like France with a precious object like that,’ Sewell continues. ‘You have to have a licence, a permit. Important people have to look at it first.’
The El Greco’s owner, however, wasn’t interested in the details. ‘He told me that I’d have to either take it now or forget it,’ says Sewell. ‘I asked if there was anything I could wrap it in, but he said, “No.” So I got a taxi to Charles de Gaulle airport with no luggage except for an El Greco under my arm.
‘I had to queue to go through security and when the guard asked if I had anything to declare, I had to say: “Only this picture.” He took it from me and asked what it was and I told him – I didn’t want to deceive him. So he held it up to the people behind me in the queue and said, “He says this is an El Greco” – and they all roared with laughter. He then gave it back to me and off I went.
‘We went on to sell it for a worldrecord price – although we couldn’t quote the provenance.’
Sewell is full of high-calibre tales. His autobiographies, Outsider (2011) and Outsider II (2012), are chock-ablock with wit and worldly wisdom, qualities that also shine out of his new children’s book, The White Umbrella, in which Mr B (clearly, Sewell) rescues an injured donkey in Pakistan and walks it home to England.
But while we chuckle over cheese straws, El Greco and Lottie’s grumbles, there is also a sadness in the room. For Brian is clearly weakening, fading. In fact, he is dying.
Last year, he was diagnosed with a neuroendocrine cancer in his head. The initial surgery went well and was followed by chemo- and radiotherapy. But all was not well.
‘Everybody seemed terribly pleased with it. I was given a six-week break and then they did another body scan and said, “Oh dear. We’ve made a marvellous job of the surgery… but you’ve got additional tumours, which we hadn’t noticed,”’ he tells me.
‘It was rather a bungle, in my view, that they didn’t discover the subsidiary tumours sooner,’ he adds. ‘They were so diverted by the tumour in my head that they didn’t do any tests, X-rays or scans lower than the middle of my chest… When they did a scan after the operation, and thought I was cured, they saw right at the bottom a shadow, which they couldn’t interpret.’
They did another scan and it ‘turned out to be clusters of tumours in my lungs, stomach and against my liver, pancreas and kidneys’.
The chemotherapy continued, but late last month, at a meeting with his consultant, treatment was withdrawn. ‘It was a disaster,’ he tells me. ‘I was discharged… The chemotherapy wasn’t working. There is no other solution. The tumours are getting larger. They just said there’s no point in wasting any more effort on treating me. In a way, I’ve been put to sea in a rudderless boat.
‘It’s a sort of death sentence but I don’t know when... The only comfort from their point of view is what they will give me when the pain becomes intolerable... I don’t want to die here, but I don’t want to go into a hospice three weeks before I die. I want to be dying when I get to the hospice.’
There’s plenty of fight left in Sewell yet, though. He jokes, he laughs and when one of his bugbears strays into the conversation, his infamous sting is as sharp as ever, triggering a supportive growl from Lottie.
Today, he’s irritated about losing his sense of taste, a side effect of the radiotherapy. Oysters, once a favourite, are now joyless, flavourless blobs.
‘I can still taste mustard and I am eating about 100g of it a week,’ he chuckles. ‘And the same is true of Marmite…’
And then there’s the frustration that he may not be able to finish his latest book – on Michelangelo. He has yet to start – ‘I’m wasting my time with little things’ – but this appears to be the book he has always dreamt of writing.
‘The trouble with Michelangelo is that he gets bogged down in politics and finance… and that gets so complicated that ordinary people tend to lose sight of the sculpture because of all the drama… I don’t want to get bogged down in any of that because I don’t think it has anything to do with the executed work.’
He wants to take Michelangelo back to basics, to focus on his art. ‘When you are looking at Michelangelo, this is what you should see, this is what you should do – because I believe you should walk right around his sculptures… If you walk around the David you pick up the movements within the body, the tensions, the stance, the balance. It is a figure that is inactive simply because it has completed an action and is about to make another.’
Brian is rumbustiously old school – and can be excoriating when it comes to contemporary art. Certainly he is no fan of much displayed on Trafalgar Square’s showcase fourth plinth.
‘I would leave it empty,’ he says. ‘I don’t think that anybody is now capable of filling it. When you look at the range of nonsense that has been there – that transparent cast of the plinth, upside down, was that a clever idea? Was the blue cockerel a clever idea? Shonibare’s ship in a bottle looks so shabby and faded and rubbishy. There it is in Greenwich now, looking ghastly.
‘At least the horse that is there now, the skeleton, pays homage to Stubbs... But is there a person you would want to put up there? Do you really want to put Mrs Thatcher there? Tony Blair there? No.
‘They’ve managed for 150 years or so with nothing on the plinth, waiting for someone great and good enough to be worth it and no one’s turned up yet. There were several sculptures of Thatcher and they were all awful. She’s very difficult to sculpt because she is not a real person, she is herself a construct. And to a certain extent, the Queen has become a gentler, sweeter, kinder, nicer version. She doesn’t look terribly good on the postage stamp.
‘Have we had a great politician in the past half century? No. Have we had a great theologian? A great Archbishop of Canterbury? No.’
In fact, he believes that, culturally, we may be entering a new Dark Age.
‘When you look from Donatello to Rodin, over those five centuries, the progress is inexorable, but very slow. There is a building on and a confirmation of the earlier sculpture…’
But now, Sewell believes, money is driving a hollow bonanza, a bubble. ‘There is no discrimination any more. There are very few artists who are doing anything that is in any way developing.’
He also despairs how the public are told what to think of a work, ‘not necessarily by the artist, but quite often by the dealer, or the dealer has paid the critic to perjure himself by writing bollocks’. And he fears it could be centuries before the sham is exposed. ‘Too much money has been put into it… it’s here to stay.’
I ask, respectfully, whether he isn’t just an old grouch? ‘What are critics for?’ he replies, smiling. ‘Critics are there to tell the truth as they see it. And when I see a sculptor who casts his own head in his own blood… it’s the exploitation of a gimmick, rather than the exploration of a new idea.’
Clearly Sewell is one of our greatest authorities on art. So does he ever wonder why he has never been awarded a knighthood – or at least an MBE? ‘I’m not sure that I want one. I would be tempted if it were one of the more distinguished things. But what’s the point – and now I am going to say something very snobbish – of getting the medal that everybody gets…
‘I would have been a good and useful trustee of the National Gallery… I would have defended the scholarship of the National Gallery, rather than all the trendy rubbish about outreach and education… I would always argue that you have to keep the experience of the National Gallery as one of great and serious pleasure… The National Gallery has turned into my idea of hell in terms of noise and the number of people there and the way that people behave… Young people, in particular, have no manners at all.’
Gosh. Isn’t that all a bit elitist? ‘You need elitism. It’s what makes things work. It sets standards. It becomes something to which you aspire… you can’t run museums and galleries without having some sort of elitism. The BBC would be infinitely better if it were elitist… The BBC is now dumbed down so far that that is what is now expected of it.’
Perhaps surprisingly, Sewell is something of an expert on one current BBC hot potato. As an avid car fan, he has watched Top Gear – from which Jeremy Clarkson recently was fired after an altercation with a producer – from the very beginning. He even appeared in a 2003 episode, during which he, Heinz Wolff and Colin Pillinger were challenged to drive a car at full speed… before slamming it into reverse.
Evidently he didn’t warm to Clarkson. Sewell claims that when he told Clarkson that he hadn’t particularly enjoyed the stunt, ‘Clarkson replied: “What do you expect me to do about it?”
‘I suggested that he might at least plant a tree and about an hour later a minion turned up with a sapling and a spade and Clarkson threw them at me and said, “There you are, plant your tree” – in the middle of that airfield,’ he continues. ‘Anyway, the boy who had arrived with the tree picked them up and dug a hole and planted it, but there was no thought about the fate of the tree. It couldn’t possibly grow there… I have seen Clarkson in the raw.
‘There was an occasion a little earlier when I was shortlisted by a magazine for a motoring prize, alongside Jeremy Clarkson. They gave the prize to me and Clarkson stormed out… He had a tantrum and left… He’s never quite grown up. He’s always been Flashman.’
After three colourful hours in his company, it’s clear that a larger light will go out when eventually Sewell leaves us – he’s just too big a character not to miss.
I just hope that he gets his last tango with Michelangelo.
The White Umbrella, by Brian Sewell, with illustrations by Sally Ann Lasson (Quartet Books, £9.99).
Outsiders In London: Are You One Too?, featuring Milan Svanderlik’s photographs of Brian Sewell, is open until 8 May at the Crypt, St Martinin- the-Field, London WC2: 020-7766 1100, www.outsidersinlondon.org
Brian, meanwhile, is telling me the story of the naughtiest (printable) thing he has ever done. He speaks slowly, softly, interrupting himself occasionally to offer me a cheese straw or a Cadbury chocolate finger.
It was the early 1960s when Sewell, now one of Britain’s best-known art critics, was working for Christie’s auction house. ‘I had to fly to Paris to see someone who wanted to sell an El Greco,’ he begins.
Sewell was to rendezvous with the contact for breakfast, but the man he met explained that the El Greco wasn’t his and that he’d have to meet a second man for lunch. ‘It wasn’t his painting either,’ Sewell explains, ‘and he told me that we’d have to meet yet another man for tea.
‘Anyway, eventually we had tea with this very young man who was extraordinarily beautiful – and who really did own the El Greco. It was a picture standing about two feet high, a preliminary sketch.’
It was likely worth a small fortune and the owner wanted Sewell to take it to London for sale. ‘But you can’t just walk out of a country like France with a precious object like that,’ Sewell continues. ‘You have to have a licence, a permit. Important people have to look at it first.’
The El Greco’s owner, however, wasn’t interested in the details. ‘He told me that I’d have to either take it now or forget it,’ says Sewell. ‘I asked if there was anything I could wrap it in, but he said, “No.” So I got a taxi to Charles de Gaulle airport with no luggage except for an El Greco under my arm.
‘I had to queue to go through security and when the guard asked if I had anything to declare, I had to say: “Only this picture.” He took it from me and asked what it was and I told him – I didn’t want to deceive him. So he held it up to the people behind me in the queue and said, “He says this is an El Greco” – and they all roared with laughter. He then gave it back to me and off I went.
‘We went on to sell it for a worldrecord price – although we couldn’t quote the provenance.’
Sewell is full of high-calibre tales. His autobiographies, Outsider (2011) and Outsider II (2012), are chock-ablock with wit and worldly wisdom, qualities that also shine out of his new children’s book, The White Umbrella, in which Mr B (clearly, Sewell) rescues an injured donkey in Pakistan and walks it home to England.
But while we chuckle over cheese straws, El Greco and Lottie’s grumbles, there is also a sadness in the room. For Brian is clearly weakening, fading. In fact, he is dying.
Last year, he was diagnosed with a neuroendocrine cancer in his head. The initial surgery went well and was followed by chemo- and radiotherapy. But all was not well.
‘Everybody seemed terribly pleased with it. I was given a six-week break and then they did another body scan and said, “Oh dear. We’ve made a marvellous job of the surgery… but you’ve got additional tumours, which we hadn’t noticed,”’ he tells me.
‘It was rather a bungle, in my view, that they didn’t discover the subsidiary tumours sooner,’ he adds. ‘They were so diverted by the tumour in my head that they didn’t do any tests, X-rays or scans lower than the middle of my chest… When they did a scan after the operation, and thought I was cured, they saw right at the bottom a shadow, which they couldn’t interpret.’
They did another scan and it ‘turned out to be clusters of tumours in my lungs, stomach and against my liver, pancreas and kidneys’.
The chemotherapy continued, but late last month, at a meeting with his consultant, treatment was withdrawn. ‘It was a disaster,’ he tells me. ‘I was discharged… The chemotherapy wasn’t working. There is no other solution. The tumours are getting larger. They just said there’s no point in wasting any more effort on treating me. In a way, I’ve been put to sea in a rudderless boat.
‘It’s a sort of death sentence but I don’t know when... The only comfort from their point of view is what they will give me when the pain becomes intolerable... I don’t want to die here, but I don’t want to go into a hospice three weeks before I die. I want to be dying when I get to the hospice.’
There’s plenty of fight left in Sewell yet, though. He jokes, he laughs and when one of his bugbears strays into the conversation, his infamous sting is as sharp as ever, triggering a supportive growl from Lottie.
Today, he’s irritated about losing his sense of taste, a side effect of the radiotherapy. Oysters, once a favourite, are now joyless, flavourless blobs.
‘I can still taste mustard and I am eating about 100g of it a week,’ he chuckles. ‘And the same is true of Marmite…’
And then there’s the frustration that he may not be able to finish his latest book – on Michelangelo. He has yet to start – ‘I’m wasting my time with little things’ – but this appears to be the book he has always dreamt of writing.
‘The trouble with Michelangelo is that he gets bogged down in politics and finance… and that gets so complicated that ordinary people tend to lose sight of the sculpture because of all the drama… I don’t want to get bogged down in any of that because I don’t think it has anything to do with the executed work.’
He wants to take Michelangelo back to basics, to focus on his art. ‘When you are looking at Michelangelo, this is what you should see, this is what you should do – because I believe you should walk right around his sculptures… If you walk around the David you pick up the movements within the body, the tensions, the stance, the balance. It is a figure that is inactive simply because it has completed an action and is about to make another.’
Brian is rumbustiously old school – and can be excoriating when it comes to contemporary art. Certainly he is no fan of much displayed on Trafalgar Square’s showcase fourth plinth.
‘I would leave it empty,’ he says. ‘I don’t think that anybody is now capable of filling it. When you look at the range of nonsense that has been there – that transparent cast of the plinth, upside down, was that a clever idea? Was the blue cockerel a clever idea? Shonibare’s ship in a bottle looks so shabby and faded and rubbishy. There it is in Greenwich now, looking ghastly.
‘At least the horse that is there now, the skeleton, pays homage to Stubbs... But is there a person you would want to put up there? Do you really want to put Mrs Thatcher there? Tony Blair there? No.
‘They’ve managed for 150 years or so with nothing on the plinth, waiting for someone great and good enough to be worth it and no one’s turned up yet. There were several sculptures of Thatcher and they were all awful. She’s very difficult to sculpt because she is not a real person, she is herself a construct. And to a certain extent, the Queen has become a gentler, sweeter, kinder, nicer version. She doesn’t look terribly good on the postage stamp.
‘Have we had a great politician in the past half century? No. Have we had a great theologian? A great Archbishop of Canterbury? No.’
In fact, he believes that, culturally, we may be entering a new Dark Age.
‘When you look from Donatello to Rodin, over those five centuries, the progress is inexorable, but very slow. There is a building on and a confirmation of the earlier sculpture…’
But now, Sewell believes, money is driving a hollow bonanza, a bubble. ‘There is no discrimination any more. There are very few artists who are doing anything that is in any way developing.’
He also despairs how the public are told what to think of a work, ‘not necessarily by the artist, but quite often by the dealer, or the dealer has paid the critic to perjure himself by writing bollocks’. And he fears it could be centuries before the sham is exposed. ‘Too much money has been put into it… it’s here to stay.’
I ask, respectfully, whether he isn’t just an old grouch? ‘What are critics for?’ he replies, smiling. ‘Critics are there to tell the truth as they see it. And when I see a sculptor who casts his own head in his own blood… it’s the exploitation of a gimmick, rather than the exploration of a new idea.’
Clearly Sewell is one of our greatest authorities on art. So does he ever wonder why he has never been awarded a knighthood – or at least an MBE? ‘I’m not sure that I want one. I would be tempted if it were one of the more distinguished things. But what’s the point – and now I am going to say something very snobbish – of getting the medal that everybody gets…
‘I would have been a good and useful trustee of the National Gallery… I would have defended the scholarship of the National Gallery, rather than all the trendy rubbish about outreach and education… I would always argue that you have to keep the experience of the National Gallery as one of great and serious pleasure… The National Gallery has turned into my idea of hell in terms of noise and the number of people there and the way that people behave… Young people, in particular, have no manners at all.’
Gosh. Isn’t that all a bit elitist? ‘You need elitism. It’s what makes things work. It sets standards. It becomes something to which you aspire… you can’t run museums and galleries without having some sort of elitism. The BBC would be infinitely better if it were elitist… The BBC is now dumbed down so far that that is what is now expected of it.’
Perhaps surprisingly, Sewell is something of an expert on one current BBC hot potato. As an avid car fan, he has watched Top Gear – from which Jeremy Clarkson recently was fired after an altercation with a producer – from the very beginning. He even appeared in a 2003 episode, during which he, Heinz Wolff and Colin Pillinger were challenged to drive a car at full speed… before slamming it into reverse.
Evidently he didn’t warm to Clarkson. Sewell claims that when he told Clarkson that he hadn’t particularly enjoyed the stunt, ‘Clarkson replied: “What do you expect me to do about it?”
‘I suggested that he might at least plant a tree and about an hour later a minion turned up with a sapling and a spade and Clarkson threw them at me and said, “There you are, plant your tree” – in the middle of that airfield,’ he continues. ‘Anyway, the boy who had arrived with the tree picked them up and dug a hole and planted it, but there was no thought about the fate of the tree. It couldn’t possibly grow there… I have seen Clarkson in the raw.
‘There was an occasion a little earlier when I was shortlisted by a magazine for a motoring prize, alongside Jeremy Clarkson. They gave the prize to me and Clarkson stormed out… He had a tantrum and left… He’s never quite grown up. He’s always been Flashman.’
After three colourful hours in his company, it’s clear that a larger light will go out when eventually Sewell leaves us – he’s just too big a character not to miss.
I just hope that he gets his last tango with Michelangelo.
The White Umbrella, by Brian Sewell, with illustrations by Sally Ann Lasson (Quartet Books, £9.99).
Outsiders In London: Are You One Too?, featuring Milan Svanderlik’s photographs of Brian Sewell, is open until 8 May at the Crypt, St Martinin- the-Field, London WC2: 020-7766 1100, www.outsidersinlondon.org