MAY/JUNE 2025
Conceited confessions first … I am far too highly educated, discerning, well-read and knowledgeable about absolutely everything ever to have visited an exhibition of paintings by Jack Vettriano (1951-2025). Neither can I recall ever encountering, even by accident, any original picture by him. To my mind and eyes, there’s nothing there, no one at home, so why bother? Am I a snob? Definitely. Am I prejudiced? Undoubtedly, about all manner of things you wouldn’t credit in so thoughtful, rational and intelligent a person as myself. Jack painted the sort of slick, faintly sleazy poster art I don’t care for; the sort which in reproduction, I imagine, might appeal to self-important minor executives who know the cost of everything and can bore for England about their car’s horsepower. (Don’t get me wrong I love some poster artists, Tom Purvis (1888-1959) being a recent discovery. A century ago he painted similar-ish subjects to Vettriano but with a more developed appreciation of form, colour, originality, design and purpose. He’s yet another fine artist about whom there is no literature.) But, but, I have to confess again to that nagging chip on my shoulder – the one expanding unstoppably like the universe – to a soft spot, an incurable core attraction, for any working class bloke thumbing his nose at the art establishment … and, do you know, they don’t even have to be right to command my resolute support.
I’m uncomfortable with Vettriano’s subjects, some of whose details, including those in that most famous one (The Singing Butler, 1991, which sold for £740,000 in 2005), were copied from designer pattern books. He paints that swanky ‘nouveau’ class of which lower income workers are often envious: poshly dressed gangster types splashing cash, supping cocktails and driving Gatsby convertibles alongside arm candy which understands its function as exclusively horizontal. In short, the sort of people post-war working class blokes would have readily emulated if only they’d selected eight score draws last week.
Prejudice ought not to matter when it comes to public policy concerning visual art, but it does, it matters a lot, and it’s worse now than ever before. Readers of this paper will know that any public body should support excellence wherever it alights on the artistic rainbow and, unfortunately, this includes the likes of allegedly popular figures like Vettriano. As I say, I wouldn’t personally visit an exhibition of his, but only in the same way that I know intuitively and by experience that anything on show these days at the Hayward or Serpentine Galleries will be a waste of the little time remaining to me above ground.
But the art establishment is not this inclusive or tolerant. Openness and range, and especially wider popularity are ignored. As these pages have documented for a quarter of a century, the official hierarchy is narrowly despotic about the art it will show and support. Public policy, as dictated by the Arts Council and its servile satellites who depend on it for money, has changed from its earliest days. Then it responded to what artists were producing, almost wherever they appeared on the style spectrum, whereas now it dictates what it is and is not prepared to support and exhibit, often for reasons other than purely artistic ones. This volte face is a calculated subverting of the Arts Council’s originally intended purpose. Before its founding in 1946, when an arts body was first proposed and discussed during the war, that seer George Orwell, who had thought hard about precisely this, warned that today’s form of prescriptive dictatorship must inevitably develop – Animal Farm, with its similar warnings about evolving, self-serving tyranny, was published in 1945. Yet another thing the great man got right.
Does this mean that the likes of an allegedly popular artist like Vettriano should be collected and exhibited by publicly owned and funded art galleries? Unarguably yes. I wouldn’t be offended if the Tate owned that picture of ballroom dancers on the coast; after all, they are already undiscriminating enough to have acquired ten (ten!) works by that uniquely talentless idiot Bob and Roberta Smith OBE RA. In 2009 Banksy broke attendance records at Bristol Art Gallery, as did Rolf Harris three years later in Liverpool. I had no objection to either of these displays: while they were on I will have occupied myself more productively elsewhere. As Selby Whittingham recently pointed out, there are many different potential audiences for art which might at different times in varied exhibition programmes be catered to. And there are now a sufficient number of public galleries dispersed nationally for the diversity of the art panorama to be represented somewhere somehow at some time.
So should there be a posthumous retrospective of Jack Vettriano’s work? What do you think?