Brian Sewell

Early life

Sewell was born on 15 July 1931. The man who in later life he claimed to have been his father, composer Philip Heseltine, better known as Peter Warlock, died in unexplained circumstances seven months before he 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 independent 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. 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 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.

Art criticism and controversy

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.

In April 2003, he was awarded the George 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.

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 to female artists was controversial. 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.

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 "A Bigger Picture", a David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy, as concluding that Hockney had made a mistake focusing on painting in his later career:

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 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."

Television

In 2003, Sewell made a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in a documentary called The Naked Pilgrim, produced by Wag TV for Channel 5. Although he had not practised for decades, Sewell considered himself a Roman Catholic, prompting an emotional response to the faith of pilgrims at Lourdes. The series attracted large audiences and won the Sandford St. Martin Trust award for Best Religious Programme. Following The Naked Pilgrim Sewell presented on two more series for Channel 5: Brian Sewell's Phantoms & Shadows: 100 Years of Rolls-Royce in 2004 and Brian Sewell's Grand Tour in 2006. Sewell also appeared as a guest film reviewer on Channel 5's Movie Lounge, where he frequently savaged films.

In Dirty Dalí: A Private View on Channel 4 on 3 June 2007, Sewell described his acquaintance with Salvador Dalí in the late 1960s, which included lying in the foetal position without trousers in the armpit of a figure of Christ and masturbating for Dalí, who pretended to take photos while fumbling in his trousers. Sewell appeared twice as panellist on the BBC's quiz Have I Got News for You and tried to teach cricketer Phil Tufnell about art (and learn about cricket) in ITV's Don't Call Me Stupid.

Sewell was the voice of Sir Kiftsgate in an episode of the children's cartoon The Big Knights. He also had programme on Voom HD Network's Art Channel: Gallery HD called Brian Sewell's Grand Tour, in which he toured beautiful cities (primarily in Italy) visiting museums, towns, churches, historic sights, public squares, monuments, profound architectural spots and meeting a local to discuss culture and art. Sewell reflected upon the 18th century, giving the perspective of what it would have been like as a 'Grand Tourist'. Then he elaborated on what has become of these sights and lost throughout history. In a 2009 BBC documentary about the UK's so-called North-South divide, presented by ex-Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, Sewell caused controversy by declaring that the solution to the divide was to send a pox or a plague upon the North so that the people there could all just die quietly.

Brian Badonde, one of the best known characters from the comedy show Facejacker, played by Kayvan Novak, is said to be a parody of Sewell. His distinctive accent was regularly parodied by the impressions show Dead Ringers, which featured him participating in mundane activities or presenting CBBC4, an arts channel targeted at children (the name being a combination of CBBC and BBC Four).

Other activities

Sewell was a museum adviser in South Africa, Germany and the United States.

He provided voice-overs for a variety of television commercials including for the Victoria and Albert Museum and feta cheese.

Sewell was also a noted aficionado of classic automobiles, a fan of stock car racing and over several decades wrote extensively about cars, classic and contemporary, in the London Evening Standard and elsewhere. In both his TV series, on the pilgrimage to Santiago and the Grand Tour (see above), he drove his Mercedes-Benz 560 SEC coupé. Sewell expressed a preference for driving his Mercedes barefoot.

Personal life

In a television programme broadcast on Channel 4 on 24 July 2007, marking the 40th anniversary of the passing of the Sexual Offences Act 1967 which partially decriminalised homosexuality in England and Wales, Sewell said, "I never came out... but I have slowly emerged". Sewell was described as bisexual but also described himself as gay, saying he knew he probably was homosexual at the age of six.

He had chastised himself for his attraction to men, describing it 'as an "affliction" and a "disability" and told readers, "no homosexual has ever chosen this sexual compulsion"'. In the first episode of The Naked Pilgrim Sewell alluded to the loss of his virginity at the hands of a 60-year-old French woman "who knew what she was doing and was determined"; Sewell was 20 at the time. In his autobiography, Sewell indicates that he lost his virginity at the age of 15 to a fellow pupil at Haberdashers' Aske's School.

Sewell stated that he was more comfortable with the term queer than gay to describe himself, and expressed opposition to same-sex marriage.

In 2011 Sewell exposed the identity of his father, as revealed by his mother on her deathbed. He also revealed that his stepfather Robert Sewell and his mother, Mary Jessica (née Perkins), a publican's daughter from Camden, had admitted that Robert was not his father when he was 11, although he had always known it to be the case (they did not marry until 1936). An archive of papers relating to Sewell's personal and professional life is held by the Paul Mellon Centre.

Death

Sewell died of cancer on 19 September 2015 at the age of 84 in London.

Legacy

The Sewell-Hohler Syndicate (named respectively after Brian Sewell and E.C. Hohler) was launched at Sewell's alma mater, the Courtauld Institute of Art, on 19 September 2016, one year after his death. The society serves to promote, in the spirit of Brian Sewell, free speech and interest in the arts through conferences, interviews, and regular meetings, and generally opposes the notion of 'safe spaces' as well as the practice of 'no-platforming' speakers/members.

Archives

The Brian Sewell Archive consists mainly of Sewell's articles written in his role as an art critic as well passports, diaries, press-cuttings, postcards, photographs, programmes, research, scripts, voice-over texts, memorabilia, and correspondence. The archive is held at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.