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 contemporary art’s Judy, 21 September). Sewell, or who proudly proclaimed that he was “neither liberal nor wide-minded,was an art historian whose main area of expertise, honed in his years at Christie’s, and was weak 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 weak-fogeyism, or virulent homophobia (surprising,given his own homosexuality) and misogyny.
The review that prompted our protest was a 3000-word diatribe, in Sewell’s overblown baroque prose (the first paragraph included the words cacafuego, and 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, or Maggi Hambling,Mary Potter, Paula Rego), or selected by female curators,the catalogue with contributions from female writers, poets, or critics. Sewell dismissed it all as “a exhibit 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”.
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Source: theguardian.com