Brian Sewell in his own words: extracts from the memoirs of the Evening Standard’s legendary art critic

Whether describing his mother, the Blunt Affair, his beloved dogs or his sexual appetite, the Evening Standard’s art critic, Brian Sewell, who died on Saturday, never held back — as these extracts from his memoirs show
'Quite cuddly, really': Brian Sewell with his dog Jack, a rescue whippet
Brian Sewell21 September 2015

Family

My earliest recollection of my mother is looking down on her and recognising fear. I have no memory of looking up at her, of seeing the bodyless head in which analysts who bother themselves with the earliest artistic impulses of the child would have us believe, the great smiling face of the adult looming over the cradle or the pram, but looking down from the not inconsiderable height of an overhanging branch has stayed with me all my life.

My mother may have been something of a prostitute. This is putting it too baldly, but it is the only way I can explain why, throughout years of pinching penury, she kept her evening dresses in repair. She kept her looks too. In her thirties, slim on her near-starvation diet, tall but small-boned, with a fine skin and an exquisitely pale complexion enhanced by rich brown hair, although she always affected a tragic air, subtly shadowing the sockets of her large dark eyes, she looked a decade younger; on the street, with her long legs and stride, men turned their heads for her.

Stricken by the breakdown of my first long homosexual relationship, a breakdown of which my mother’s subconscious jealous behaviour had been the principal cause, I determined to tell her of my sexuality and did so in a letter, knowing that this she would read, but that any face-to-face confession would be so interrupted that I might not finish it, or worse, that the rising tension would lead to a row. She returned my letter with no warmth or understanding, but with only the words “You are just like your father”. This I could not set aside. I repeatedly asked for more. Still she would not give me his name but the anger of prompted recollection drove her on: she told me that my father had for some years lived in Eynsford with another man who satisfied his taste for being sodomised while fucking his women friends, one of whom she had been.

Her defiance astonished me and she held to it to the very end, for it was not to me that she eventually divulged the name — Philip Heseltine, alias Peter Warlock — but to a friend shrewd enough to ally himself with her and agree that I had been heartless and unfeeling.

Unsettled beginnings: Brian Sewell as a toddler, in 1934

[My stepfather] Robert Sewell was a good man, but this for all my boyhood years I failed to recognise. Early in 1942 he married my mother without sacramental ceremony, legally adopted me and changed my name to his. He treated me then as I now treat a rescued dog that must learn an unfamiliar name; as I in my time have said over and over again in a dog’s ear “Your name is Titian,” or Schubert, or Nusch, so he said that my name was Brian Sewell and made me write it in my books.

[After he died] a woman arrived at the door, demanded entry and said: “All this is mine.” She had with her a rather younger woman and a solicitor with evidence that the one was Robert’s wife and the other his daughter. His marriage to my mother had been bigamous and he left her penniless. Robert’s adoption of me, though with the best of intentions, was fraudulent — and my mother knew it.

School

Haberdashers’ Aske’s school motto, Serve and Obey, I loathed, thinking it perfect for tired old things who stood behind haberdashery counters measuring elastic at a penny three-farthings for a yard, but not for a boy who had been taught to think.

But I learned wonderful new things — metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole and metaphor — and have been in love with English ever since. I must argue that all children are not equal and are not able to respond in equal measure to equal opportunities. I blame no one for my failure in maths, for I had no aptitude for it, but I do blame those who failed to see that, with figures, I was halted by a mental block so solid that I felt it physically.

National Service

What did I learn from National Service? I learned to shoot with a cold accuracy that surprised the men who taught me. I learned to ride a motorcycle and to drive almost everything the Army had on wheels.

I learned to pitch a tent and dig a trench and wriggle at a snake’s pace on my belly. I learned, if I did not already have them, the habits of neatness and economy.

Most of a lifetime later I am so burdened by moral baggage that I have perhaps lost the ruthlessness the Army taught me, but for decades I believed that my two years of National Service had done me far more good than my three as an undergraduate, my eight at school and 20 on my knees in church.

Notorious: described as "Britain's most famous and controversial art critic", Sewell was noted for his acerbic views
David O'Neill

The Blunt Affair

Under Anthony [Blunt]’s wing, the [Courtauld] Institute attracted the greatest scholars of the post-war years. For students the atmosphere was as forcing as a gardener’s hothouse, as puritanical and conditioning as a monastery (and as chaste) encouraging in most of the minds closed to any career that did not involve the further pursuit of art history.

On the evening of Sunday 9 September 1979, Anthony told me, less as a friend, I thought, than formally, as his executor perhaps, that he might soon, in a book, be exposed as part of the Burgess-Maclean-Philby business. What should he do? “You must have signed the Official Secrets Act?” I asked, and he confirmed that he had.

[Blunt’s solicitor] Michael Rubinstein had just been informed by the Cabinet Office that the Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher was that afternoon to make a statement that would confirm the rumours of espionage and treachery. Anthony asked me to take him to stay with John Golding and James Joll in Ravenscourt Park; but he could think of no way of leaving Portsea Hall unobserved. I took a suitcase with an old loose overcoat that had belonged to my stepfather, mufflers and a broad-brimmed stitched tweed hat that I wore when walking dogs in the rain. Anthony let me in. I, with Anthony muffled as an invalid and leaning heavily on me, took the lift to the ground floor, tottered past the hall porter (who knew perfectly well who we were) and, deep in conversation, made our slow way across the forecourt to the car. There was an awkward moment with his long legs as I got him into his seat, but not once did I look back at the reporters and it was only when I started the engine that one of them began to run.

On the way, Anthony gave me very clear instructions. I was to keep the press occupied and him informed if they lit on anything particularly ghastly.

In retrospect it would have been wiser to disobey Anthony, say nothing and do nothing, for every scrap of rebuttal to a mob of journalists determined on obloquy and odium served only to reinforce their savagery. It has been said that Anthony was displeased by much of what I said and did, but he said nothing at the time, offered no change of instruction and the exhausting pantomime continued.

How then could so scrupulously scholarly a man, so dry, precise, considered and unemotional in everything he wrote for art and architecture, be such a fool as to put his scholarship at risk for a political philosophy in which he had virtually no belief? And to this the answer is Guy Burgess, with whom he perhaps never went to bed, but who won from him undying loyalty — Burgess, at first handsome, charming, witty and homosexually amoral, at last a scruffy drunken slob with the halitosis of a dragon. The obvious question to ask is why was Guy a communist? Had he not been, nor would Anthony.

Christie’s

I had been slipping into Christie’s since I was 15 or so and was intrigued by the idea and the possibility of a regular income that would lend stability to my life.

I wasted my time putting together sales of ghastly and near worthless pictures when I should have been writing catalogue entries that drew attention to the rarity, beauty and particular or art historical interest of the better pictures that we sold.

Leaving Christie’s [in 1967] was painful. The longest episode of my life — longer than school, the army or the Courtauld Institute, it had been a period of continual growth in knowledge and experience, of constant opportunity, although I felt I had given the firm as much as it had given me. And I was leaving it, not because I had exhausted its resources, nor because it had exhausted mine, not for any professional advancement, but because I was damned for being queer.

Sexuality

In 1959 I launched into a life of such promiscuity as might suggest that I was making up for the golden years that had passed me by, for the opportunities lost in the arid years of denial, but it was sheer intoxication with the sudden ease of it and the abandonment of guilt. It was not unusual to pick up a companion on my way home — Cléo de cinq a sept, so to speak — to have had a fuck one way or the other and be home having a bath by seven, then to go and see my current lover (duration three days to three weeks perhaps), and on the way home to pick up someone else with whom either to have a quickie before bed or take home for the night — which usually meant another perfunctory fuck first thing in the morning. Throw in a few Jack Rabbit weekends and all this might amount to 1,000 fucks a year and easily 1,000 sexual partners in a quinquennium.

Brian Sewell in pictures

1/5

Catholicism

I felt compelled to examine what I had thought my spiritual conviction. Examined and interviewed in retreats over a period of years, I had the comfort that others too had perceived a vocation, but my own certainty was weakening. I wanted to believe the miracles and myths, particularly of the Transubstantiation of the Host, for I found them beautiful and I was so often emotionally touched by the unquestioning beliefs of others (and am so still) that I doubted my own doubts.

Salvador Dalí

Dalí was perhaps not quite six feet in height[the two met at the end of the Sixties in Cadaques]; at 64 he had begun to stoop a little and, conscious of it, had the habit of often straightening his spine, squaring his shoulders and puffing out his chest. His hair was thinning, receding, and I think dyed, for there was no hint of grey or white; it was by no means fastidiously clean. The moustache was, I think, important as some sort of delusory monument to an equally delusory virility. His breath was always foul, sometimes so foul that I wished he farted more and breathed less — not that I ever heard him fart, but the subject fascinated him and he claimed to fart a lot, his farts as sweet as the perfumes of Arabia.

I wrote the necessary note when Gala died, but when he followed her… I did genuinely grieve. For once the wider public had been right — and is right still: Dalí deserves his reputation with them as the last of the great old masters.

TV favourite: Brian Sewell presenting Channel 5 television show 'The Naked Pilgrim the road to Santiago'
Anthony Cake

The Evening Standard

On 5 January 1994, 35 worthies of the art world, claiming to represent it (whatever it is), combined to write a letter to the Evening Standard’s editor, taking “the greatest exception to Brian Sewell’s writing”, accusing me of homophobia and misogyny, insult and scurrility, and of a “dire mix of sexual and class hypocrisy, posturing and prejudice”. Among the signatories were my erstwhile friend Nikos Stangos (what had I done to wound him? — never bear gifts to Greeks I am inclined to say), Anthony’s friend John Golding (by then not altogether a surprise), and Sandy Nairne (long the servile lackey of the Tate, the Arts Council or any other public body with which he could find employment).

Norman Rosenthal, organiser of exhibitions at the Royal Academy, spat at me within its purlieus and twice, long after I had forgotten the row, used the excuse of a hostile review to thump me on the chest — but both these blows were after cardiac surgery and I was in no condition to hit back.

Dogs

A dog’s devotion is unquestioning, undemanding and undiminishing; 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. He laments you going and rejoices at your coming back. The dog even 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. By all means let the Mr Pooters of this world view that no sane man would share his life with such an animal — but if living without the lunatic companionship of dogs is proof of sanity, please God, let me be mad.

Death

The old should cultivate the friendship of the young, if for no other reason that the immortality of ordinary mortals — those for whom there can be no obituaries in national newspapers — lasts no longer than the lives of friends.

As for dying, I do not for one moment believe that death is “the most beautiful adventure” or “an awfully big adventure”, or indeed, an adventure of any kind. These are the romantic sentiments of poets and the brave. Can we separate death from dying? The one is the inevitable consequence of the other but they seem two very different things, the dying often merciless, a prolonged torment as ingenious, excruciating and pitilessly cruel as any devised by Torquemada in the service of religion, death a sudden relaxation not only of the body, but the will. Death is not the great leveller — dying is. Dying reduces a man to leaking, dribbling, snivelling, to the helplessness of a baby, to impotent distress, to the long slow misery of being alive when he would rather be dead. That is levelling indeed.

Excerpts from Outsider (£25), Outsider II (£25) and Sleeping with Dogs (£12.50) by Brian Sewell, all published by Quartet Books

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