The Jackdaw

Tag: The National Gallery

  • Dick French: On The Town – November 2017

    It used to be said that a night out with John Bellany would take three years off your life. I’ll find out one day. We were both great friends of Cyril Reason, who was one of our tutors at the RCA, and although Cyril was less extreme than Bellany he was a thirsty man. I’ll never forget one night in The Yorker, a tall thin pub on Piccadilly (no longer there) around ’67 or ’68. Cyril improvised a game of ten-pin bowling in the upstairs bar. Bottles for skittles and heavy, round glass ashtrays rolled on edge. What fun we had before being turfed out. And talking of turf, Bellany and Cyril once wangled their way into the Royal Enclosure at Longchamps (they liked the gee-gees). They were happily guzzling away at the free champagne when they felt themselves hoisted into the air by heavies and dumped over the fence with the proles. Like many artists of the past century (Mondrian and Kandinsky for instance) Cyril had some interest in the occult and theosophy and although only fifteen years older than me he had actually met Madame Blavatsky.

    There’s a show of John’s paintings at Fortnum and Mason’s, almost next door to where The Yorker used to be. His paintings are scattered around the store but there’s a helpful catalogue so you can locate them. They are mostly later paintings from the ’80s onwards, although there’s Scottish Fish Gutter and Lost Soul from around ’65. I don’t like the later stuff as much as his earlier work, some of which was extremely good. I first saw it up in the mural room at the RCA where he used to work. A lot of the other students didn’t know what to make of him as they were all being ‘Popsy’ and minimal. In contrast his work was darkly brooding and bloody, strong meat, if a little too Celtic and rootsy for me. There was another Scotsman working close to Bellany who did enormous paintings of women being raped and throttled in public lavatories. I wonder what came of him. Bellany’s later works became formulaic; too many maidens will almond eyes, pointy chins, and thin shoulderless bodies … although there is a good painting of a fishing boat in the shop window called Intrepid.

    In the late ’60s if you were doing anything a bit out of the mainstream people would come up and say: “Hmm. Very interesting but of course completely invalid.” By ‘validity’ I think they meant conformity to the rules of art as laid down by Clement Greenberg in the ’40s and ’50s… “Integrity of the picture plane”, avoidance of depth or illusion, and regarding the painting as an object…

    Talking of which I don’t suppose you can get more ‘valid’ than Jasper Johns who is having a big show across the road from Bellany at the RA. He is said to be “interrogating the relationship between language and art”. An artist who has made ingenious use of his inadequacies – he can’t draw and has no sense of colour – grey is the predominant shade in this exhibition. Not that they aren’t decorative and sometimes even elegant, in particular the ones with dangling strings, the ‘Catenary’ series. You can’t go wrong with a catenary.

    He started off doing targets, moved on to flags, numbers, letters and bronze beer cans painted to look like the real thing. That last idea was taken up later by many other artists – didn’t someone recently do bronze bin bags? Then there were a few cast body parts followed by decades of cross-hatching. The pattern had all the qualities that interested him, namely “literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness and the possibility of complete lack of meaning”. Say no more.

    In the ’70s he met Samuel Beckett and they were supposed to have collaborated on a manuscript called ‘Foirades’ or ‘Fizzles’. The etchings accompanying the text don’t seem to have much to do with it except that they were grey and that was Beckett’s favourite colour. ‘Foirade’ is French for a silent fart but you won’t learn that from the wall charts. Another thing you won’t learn there is that Beckett disliked Johns and so no further collaborations were planned. It’s unlikely that they were collaborations anyway as the etchings were much the same stuff Johns had been doing for years. ‘Foirades’ was on sale for $6,000 in 1976.

    It’s astonishing to consider the intellectual vacuity of the New York art scene which persists to this day. At the White Cube gallery in Mason’s Yard you can see a show called ‘From the Vapour of Gasoline’ (one of Basquiat’s profundities). The show is supposed to “chronicle the dramatic ideological shift and deconstruct a national self-image opening up the space between the authorial narratives of the US and the darker histories they concealed”. Christopher Wool – he of the stencilled messages – features largely. His works are extremely expensive, but then the world is full of rich idiots seeking a safe place to stash their cash. I couldn’t bet on it being safe for much longer because ‘The king is in the altogether’ and Damien seems to have burst. But I’m not one to gloat.

    At the National Gallery an excellent exhibition, ‘Reflections, Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites’, argues that as students Holman Hunt, Rossetti and Millais became fascinated by Van Eyck’s painting of the Arnolfini wedding which hung in the west wing of the National Gallery. In those days the RA schools were in the east wing. It’s a convincing argument that this led to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who were fed up with the influence of Reynolds and the brown academic tradition of the time. They wanted brilliant colour and a more meticulous approach, Reynolds being characterised by his nickname “Sir Sloshua”. They started to paint on white grounds for sharpness and zing.

    They were also fascinated by the convex mirror on the wall behind the Arnolfinis and many of them made use of the same device in their own work. It seems likely that Velasquez was aware of this portrait as it once belonged to the Spanish court, but I suspect it’s stretching it a bit to suggest it led to his use of the mirror in Las Meninas. One of the great surprises of this show is a partial copy of Las Meninas by John Phillip from 1862. It’s extremely well painted, especially the maids’ dresses, but surely it represents an approach the Pre-Raffs were trying to escape.

    Also at the National is a show of pastels by Degas, ‘Drawn in Colour’. Well worth seeing, especially the women bathing. There are three of these, quite large for pastels. In one a woman bends over in a shallow blue tub, the blue of the tub reflected on her flank, and all against a red background. The pastel is laid on in broad parallel streaks in several built-up layers.

    There are dancers, horsemen and café scenes mostly from the Burrell in Glasgow. Next door to Degas is a gallery devoted to small landscapes painted mostly on the spot. Outstanding is Sunset in the Auvergne by Theodore Rousseau showing a distant view of the Puy de Dôme. It’s only about nine inches by seven. Don’t miss it.

    In the central hall you can see a show of paintings by Luca Giordano or Fa Presto as he was popularly known – the fast one. These are preparatory paintings for his decoration of the Galeria and Library of the Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence. The whole project took him only a year, 1682-83. I was particularly taken by the Allegory of Temperance. Maybe his tongue was in his cheek. There’s a very large Giordano further on in the National. It’s Perseus turning enemies to stone, very dramatic and well worth looking at. I suppose you could call Giordano a very late mannerist.

    At the Tate in ’64 they had a retrospective of Marcel Duchamp. Everyone took it very seriously, including me. I spent a long time pondering the significance of The Large Glass which I think was a replica made by Richard Hamilton. I thought it must be the repository of some arcane wisdom – serious and precocious that was me. A long time afterwards I realised that it was a joke, a very good joke which continues to amuse people to this day. Not many jokes can be funny for a hundred years. You’ve got to hand it to him. How about this … “The Bride fundamentally is a petrol can of love (or power-timidity). This timid potency, distributed to the motor with weak cylinders in contact with the sparks of his constant life (magneto desire) explodes and expands to the virgin who has arrived at the end of her desire.”

    I almost forgot, it includes a “gravity regulator”.

    Following a disappointing visit to The Chequers, the wonderful Spanish barmaid having moved on, I crossed over to the RA to see the Duchamp/Dali exhibition. Duchamp was quite a good cubist. He added some dynamism whereas Dali’s attempts at the same style were dreary, but it wasn’t long before the Spaniard developed his trademark illusionistic technique which curator Dawn Ades considers exquisite. I would call it “hobbyist”.

    All the familiar stuff is here, the bottle rack, stool/bicycle wheel, and that bloody urinal. What tedium. How can anybody still be interested in this crap a hundred years on? But they are.

    In one room there are a series of short films. I was hoping to see more of Gala and her charms but it wasn’t to be. One film shows an enormous banquet with Dali and Gala at the head of the table. I think it’s based on the feast scene in Bunuel’s great film Viridiana. It’s a theme that crops up again in the centrefold of the Rolling Stones album Beggars’ Banquet. Curiously, Bob Hope is among the guests. He takes the lid off a large serving dish and two frogs hop out. He does that Bob Hope face as they leap down the table.

    The traffic was so bad it took me an hour to get down to the press view of Outsiders at the Saatchi Gallery. I got there with only half an hour to spare. Imagine my surprise to find that when I signed the book mine was the only name in it. I wouldn’t normally have bothered but the ticket showed a nice girl’s bottom. Outsider art usually refers to the work of eccentrics or the mentally ill but the stuff on display was “general issue” by those just released from art school, all of which had been  knocked out very recently to fill the space available.

    To Whitehall for my morning draught in the Cock and Bottle. That monument with the dangling coats and hats is truly revolting, and the clay modeller’s conceit of leaving the pellets proud of the trousers makes Montgomery look as though he’s got dysentery. How refreshing for a while to gaze on the Burghers of Calais as I stroll along the river towards the Tate.

    Entering the Duveen Galleries I saw that the Queen of One-Trick Ponies is back in town. Her absence has not done much to furnish the space between her ears. I felt a great surge of pity for the poor woman as I surveyed the ranks of castings displayed along the floor (they are supposed to be the casts of the space underneath chairs).

    On to Haydon’s Punch and Judy where I can happily spend ten or fifteen minutes. And then a wander promiscuously through various galleries. I was in the mood for Samuel Palmer and after a few minutes with him I stepped through the arch to the unexpected pleasure of the work of Ray Harryhausen and some of the artists who inspired him such as John Martin and Gandy. Harryhausen was the maker of vintage Horror films such as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Jason and the Argonauts. He specialised in stop-motion animation and many of the models he made to work from are on display. A single scene could take four months to produce. He bought Gandy’s extraordinary painting Jupiter Pluvius but the Martins were beyond his pocket. Displayed are many of his drawings related to his film scenes. They are certainly better than Dali’s drawings.

    Wandering again I found a beautiful Pastoral by Cayley Robinson (above). I remember it being in an antechamber when the National was showing Acts of Mercy about ten years ago. Tonally, it’s remarkable, the simplified shoreline reminiscent of Munch. The fleece of the sheep is picked out by the golden moonlight which slices vertically across the lake. This is the sort of picture that would be extremely popular as a poster, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Apart from that Scotch bloke I don’t think we have any popular art. And so on to the scandalous Duchess of Argyll, a woman I’ve always admired. Gerald Brockhurst’s portrait of her is rather good although he hasn’t quite managed to suggest her lascivious nature. Goya would have managed it somehow. Apparently the famous “headless man” was Douglas Fairbanks junior. As the picture was probably a commissioned piece it wouldn’t have been appropriate to be too revealing of her predilections.

    News from the grotto. The Sage has been giving much thought to the North Korean situation. He thinks that North Korea is China’s  opening move.

    Dick French
    The Jackdaw Nov/Dec 2017

  • Dick French: On The Town – July 2017

    I heard on the wireless that Cornelia Fluff has just been appointed ‘Official Sculptor’ for the General Election. What can this mean? She’s obviously a bit of a Leftie so maybe she could run up a big bronze statue of Compo on his bicycle for Islington Green.

    Mr Serota has left the Billabong and moved uptown to a new job where he’s in charge of absolutely everything. Talk about ‘Once a Jolly Swagman’. I’ve always thought of him as Moriarty ‘The Napoleon of Art Crime’:

    “He sits motionless at the centre of his web, but that web has many radiations and he knows well every quiver of each of these. He does little himself, he only plans, but his agents are numerous and splendidly organised.” (Conan Doyle)

    Talking to Long John in The Salisbury I noticed two tickets sticking out of his shirt pocket. I enquired about them and he proudly handed them over the bar. A pair of tickets for Lord’s at £85 each. He’d just been to Locks of St James’s and spent £300 on a Panama hat. He takes his cricket seriously does Long John. When I was at school I got hit on the head by a cricket ball and have no time for it. And time is what you need for cricket.

    The chap next to me started talking about cricket and then football, but when he realised I had no interest in either he suggested we talk about golf. I think he’d been on a course. I warmed to him because he seemed rather lonely. He was wearing a syrup – not bad, quite well fitted, what used to be known as a ‘Beatle Wig’. I managed to get away and strolled down to the National Gallery. On the way I had an altercation with a street performer who was blocking the path along the south wall with a semi-circle of onlookers. I hate street theatre. You can still hear the buggers as you climb the staircase inside the gallery.

    Chrysophilus has been given his own room to display his latest efforts. He’s done a large tapestry, or rather a factory has run it up for him, based on a series of watercolours which are also on display. Enlarging such exiguous material is of course disastrous. As well as the tapestry the gallery is decked out from floor to ceiling with grisaille hangings of dusky maidens doing the hokey cokey. He didn’t even do these himself. The whole business is unspeakable so I won’t, except to observe that forty-odd years ago it would have been considered rather “girly”. Oops!

    Going past Fortnums I always get a cheery wave from the Irish millionaire who holds the door open. I was on my way to White Cube in Mason’s Yard which is conveniently just behind The Chequers on Duke Street – a pub worth visiting if only for the splendid Spanish barmaids. The WC is showing the work of Wayne Thiebaud, an artist I’ve admired since the ’60s when he was associated with Pop Art. Thiebaud is mostly a still life painter. One of the many things that distinguished him from the Pop artists was his delight in the sensual properties of paint. His cakes and pies look delicious and cakes, pies and ice creams are his favourite theme. His palette is that of the cake shop and ice cream parlour. Later on he managed to translate this into landscapes, oddly enough both rural and urban.

    Sometimes Thiebaud paints people and they’re dreadful.

    Clown Cones (see illustration), a reproduction of which I’d seen in the paper, I imagined as much bigger, but in fact it’s a modest work. I’d like to have seen it much bigger. It would have been outrageous. Cherry Pie of 2016 is delightful, as is Burger To Go of ’99. Quite why I like them so much is difficult to say. Maybe I’m pathetically grateful for finding visual pleasure in a modern painting. He slips thick streaks of lemon yellow into paintings of motorways in a convincing manner. A visionary of sorts. If I was rich I would buy Thiebaud’s pictures and hang them alongside George Rowlett’s, especially those luscious Alpine scenes where he also uses ice cream colours in a surprising way. [See page 46 for the latest Rowlett exhibition. Ed]

    The pictures here are fairly recent and are not quite as juicy as the ones I remember from the ’60s. I think it’s because most of them are done in acrylic rather than the oil of earlier times. But at 95 he is still producing great work. “Mr Thiebaud, you are to be congratulated”, as Elwood P Dowd would have remarked.

     

    To the Royal Academy Summer Show, this year presided over by the winsome Eileen Cooper, who can neither draw nor paint. But, as it says here, “She brings her experience and knowledge of diverse practices to the Summer Exhibition”.

    All the usual suspects are here, including of course ‘Paper & Glue’, the creative bachelors with yet another of their would-be photo combines. Don’t they ever get fed up with themselves? Year after year the same old flashy muck.

    There’s a painting worth looking at by Anthony Eyton of an Indian festival in Varanasi.

    Cornelia Parker is still flattening teapots. Habits acquired in art school are hard to relinquish.

    Prices are unbelievable. Gormless has done a woodcut in an edition of 5 at £30,250 each. That should keep him in vegetables for a while. And Macfisheries shows a linocut in an edition of 50 at £2,800. Fluff pops up yet again with a “polymer photogravure etching on Tiepolo Bianco paper” if you please. Edition of 15 at £3,025 a pop.

    There’s a neon sign by Biffa Bacon’s mother in an edition of 3 at £84,000 each. So rush along all you bargain hunters, why don’t you.

    An etching Girls Girls Girls by Cathy Pilkington, newly appointed Royal Academy Professor of Sculpture no less, is certainly a step up from her hideous sculptures which are curiously but understandably not on display.

    There’s even Julian Schnabel – remember him? – with a rather modestly sized load of smashed plates painted green. Nearby is a truly revolting intestinal jumble in bloody reds and pinks. It was so obscene I almost liked it. Then I realised it was by Hamish Kipper, but I don’t suppose he made it himself.

    With a few exceptions all this work seems to be a constipated extension of what they were doing at art school. There are no surprises. At college in the ’60s there was a chap who wrote in his thesis that by 1970 all innovations would had been achieved and that the future would be given over to what he called ‘conservative abstraction’. A percipient fellow, his prediction has come to pass.

    News from the grotto. The Sage writes from the wild country to tell me that the public lavatories in his local market town have been converted into an art gallery. There are lots of pictures of sheep in the snow – L’Escuela des Moutons Congeladas. On the wall some local wag has written “SID HEPPLETHWAITE HAS A BIG ONE”.

    Dick French
    The Jackdaw Jul/Aug 2017

  • Dick French: On The Town – May 2017

    Mr Wu was on the wireless last night. A very long programme on the World Service, but still I learned very little about him. He speaks as one heavily sedated. Talk about insclutable. He dwells in a large bunker under Berlin with 6,000 three-legged stools and some lifejackets. There was no mention of the poison beans, maybe he’s sold them all. The trailer described him as “one of the world’s most powerful artists”. It is puzzling how an aesthetic black hole can achieve such eminence. His career is enough to make even the most sceptical of us start subscribing to conspiracy theories. He’s one of these artistic accumulators who head things up. There’s a lot of them about. One thinks of MacFisheries, the bloke at the RA who makes animals out of coathangers and map pins. I suppose you could call it a modular approach which prevents you from making a mess… Now what can I heap up next?

    In the 19th century it took a long time for the French to latch on to the importance of Baudelaire. The Parnassian ideal was ascendant and accordingly it was possible to compose what was considered the highest poetry about almost nothing. Plus ça change.

    Art establishments have a primordial and instinctive terror of change. When Baudelaire wrote about “une oasis d’horreur dans un desert d’ennui” he could have been describing Mr Wu and the Art World.

    To the National Gallery for the exhibition of Michelangelo and Sebastiano del Piombo. Sebastiano was from Cesenatico, most famous nowadays for being the birthplace and training ground of ‘Il Pirata’, Marco Pantani, still adored by the tifosi even though almost his entire career was fuelled by coke and EPO. Contrast this with Lance Armstrong who is considered a disgrace.

    An impressive show, although two of the most interesting pieces are already in the National Gallery. One of them, The Raising of Lazarus, is among the earliest purchases of the NG. Something I’d never noticed in this painting is that a group of women close to the raising itself are holding their noses. This I learned from the wall chart, but closer inspection shows this to be untrue. They are raising their veils across the lower parts of their faces to avoid contagion. The plague, both bubonic and pneumonic, had been raging on and off for many years when this painting was being worked on and such a gesture was commonplace. Besides, after three days underground Lazarus must have been a tad smelly.

    Sebastiano composes on the diagonal and the triangle. A striking example of his triangular approach is The Judgment of Solomon. The darkening of the central figure’s head is extremely dramatic but this could be due to deterioration. In some of his paintings he lets the sfumato disintegrate the forms rather in the manner of Beccafumi. The black starts to creep in, especially in a painting of the Virgin and Child in which the infant resembles Charlie Drake. The Virgin’s head is also unsatisfactory – too much face.

    In The Visitation the foetal St John the Baptist is said to be leaping for joy in his mother’s womb during her encounter with the Virgin Mary. A difficult subject to depict. One can almost hear Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling drawling “Well I think the word difficult is awfully well chosen”.

    There are some wonderful drawings and letters in this show. Michelangelo often worked on both sides of the paper which was expensive in those days. I think he was probably a bit of a skinflint. It’s interesting that Michelangelo drew mostly with the hand when nowadays we are encouraged to draw mostly with the arm.

    Many of these paintings have dramatic bits of landscape in the background in the red-tinged sky. I couldn’t take to The Lamentation. I think it’s the expression on the Virgin’s face. Those upturned eyes and the horizontal body seem insufficiently scourged with its immaculate underpants. Still I suppose this is no place for realism.

    “People don’t buy pictures because they admire them, they buy them because others covet them.” Advice given to Constable, but I can’t remember by whom. An Andy Warhol painting of Chairman Mao has just sold in Hong Kong for $1l million. How long can this crap persist? Warhol was once described as “an ambulant black hole”. And now we’ve got another one in Mr Wu.

    To the Mall to see the painter/stainers exhibition. At the opening I met no less than the Chief Stain himself. He seemed a nice chap. Sporting his enormous bling on a chain round his neck he looked a bit like a sommelier. For once the 1st prize was worth looking at. A large, elaborate, patched-together drawing by Chris Green. Bernadette Tinko showed a small picture of a filthy brown sink, which I rather liked, while opposite Alex Rooney showed a similarly sized clean white sink. I wonder if they know each other. Cherry Pickles shows another rear view mirror piece, A487, and Peter Archer’s Cliff Edge is sensitive.

    The Scrapyard Queen shows another of her car wrecks; as always very well done but I’m always hoping she’ll ring a few changes – naked men draped over the bonnet sipping from golden cans perhaps. But I don’t think she takes me seriously.

    My friend The Sage writes from his grotto in the Yorkshire Dales sending me a copy of the Royal Academy Spring Magazine. I can’t imagine how he gets hold of such things. (Age Concern apparently.) He’s very cross about this woman who’s been appointed Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy. She’s called Cathie Pilkington and makes the most atrocious plaster dolls which are supposed to be based on the Little Dancer by Degas. As always in this kind of work the exegesis is of more importance than the thing you have to look at. And there can be few things more unpleasant than what she makes. That such an incompetent can be put in charge of students astonishes me. But it shouldn’t really. After all they have Huge Mary in charge of painting. The Sage described them as “sugar sculptures for cake decorations”. She also intends to “dress, drape, protect or obscure with soft coverings” the RA’s collection of historic casts. She means to display her dolls in a way that will make them seem “tiny but vibrant” against lush velvet curtains. Does that mean she’s going to paint them black?

    To the John Soanes, always one of my favourite places. Unfortunately it was infested by a load of plaster body castings by Marc Quinn. “The museum is an unfinished total artwork. We’re continuing the process.” Oh yeah?

    Even though these things are body casts he’s managed to get them out of proportion. The separate upper and lower parts don’t fit together properly. Someone should grab him by the beard (I imagine he’s got one) and point out shoulder to nipple, nipple to navel, naval to the foothills of the fanny – same distance. Variations do occur of course but with the rather perfect specimen he has grabbed from behind this rule would hold. If her bum was a drug it would be Class A. Her tits too, petite.

    “I think that great art is time travel. Emotional time travel.” What on earth can he mean by this? “Quinn’s works invite us to reflect on the nature and meaning of time”. I should be used to such gnomic utterances by now but I can still be surprised and puzzled.

    And here’s my version of the grab from behind…

    Dick French
    The Jackdaw May/Jun 2017

  • Dick French: On The Town – September 2016

    There’s a room in my flat that I rather grandly refer to as ‘The Library’. About 20 years ago I had it fitted out with shelves up to the ceiling with nicely boxed-in corners. It’s painted deep red. For a few years it looked splendid, then it gradually started filling up with junk. Now it’s waist-deep in motorcycle parts, leather trousers, helmets, exhaust pipes and tins of oil. I’ve been trying to excavate it recently as my son has gone off to work in New York, and now the whole flat resembles a junk yard. The book I’m trying to find is the collected writings of Sir Thomas Lawrence. So far I’ve had no luck. I remember it was dark green with faded gold lettering and quite thick. The reason I’m keen to find it is the exhibition Painters’ Paintings at the National Gallery. The great treat of this show is a preparatory drawing by Carracci for The Loves of the Gods, A Woman Being Carried Off by a Sea Monster, which used to belong to Lawrence. It’s such a fantastic piece that I’m sure he must have written about it at some length. What condition was it in before he bought it? Was it rolled up or crumpled? Where did he get it from? How much did he pay for it?

    When I find the book I’m going to be like Lieutenant Columbo when he started to whistle ‘This old man…’, but until then I’ll just consider the exhibition, which is interesting but puzzling.

    How could such a great draughtsman as Degas have lived with Cézanne’s cack-handed Bather with Outstretched Arms? The universal veneration offered up to Cézanne has always been a mystery to me. He did some lovely still lives, but get him away from the fruit and veg and the wonky bottle and jug and he’s just dreadful. Matisse owned a horrible small Cézanne of three bathers, quite ill drawn and formless – viridian, yellow ochre and navy blue. Lucien Freud also lived with a nasty little number by Cézanne, L’Après midi à Naples. Freud’s own self-portrait in this show was dismal. Thick paint, once it is dry should never be painted over. It made me itch. Lord Leighton had a dubious small Tintoretto and Van Dyck had a wonderful Titian.

    Well, so much for art.

    I wandered up to the National Portrait Gallery to see ‘The Beep’. It’s worse than ever this year. The most revolting thing of all was a photo-realist job of Andrew Motion. Motion is an unfortunate name for a poet but it’s a good description of his portrait, and from the little I’ve read of them, his verses as well. Oh, and I nearly forgot. After the Painters’ Paintings show I popped upstairs to see the Humbrol bloke from Coventry and his woodscapes. To paraphrase Richard Dawkins: “This exhibition fills a much-needed gap.”

    After another search of the library I’ve accepted that Sir Thomas Lawrence is no longer there. It’s funny how books go missing. It can be of hardly any interest to anybody but in the process of looking I’ve discovered a few old favourites: The Biggles Omnibus and a fat book of Maigret stories (illustration: Jean Gabin as the sleuth). I’m looking forward to reading these again. A few years ago Penguin started re-publishing some of the early Maigret stories and I didn’t find them all that interesting. In those early pieces Simenon had yet to discover the importance of digression which is one of the great pleasures of his later stories. I’m really interested in what Maigret had for breakfast, whether he has a demi-blanc with his croissants, and I love the way he is always sending down to the Brasserie Dauphine on the Quai des Orfèvres for beer and sandwiches when he’s in the middle of a long interrogation.

    Back to the Humbrol Man. At no point during his rather complicated tree pictures does he take advantage of a slip of the brush. Nothing is allowed to enliven his initial intention. You will search in vain for the “free gift”, and they would have looked much better on wood. The interesting piece among his life drawings was one of Aphrodite at the Waterhole, Tony Hancocks’ great sculpture from The Rebel.

    A large, shell-off crustacean with a head-mounted penis emerges from Barry Humphries’ left sleeve. It’s heading for the Dame’s face with her mismatched eyes. I am of course attending the new exhibition of David Hockney’s portraits at the Royal Academy. Hockney should be congratulated for making a little go a long way. I suppose it’s his Yorkshire thrift. Squeeze out the shrimp paste and mix it here and there with a bit of white. It should be called The Prawn Show. He has an electric motor to make his easel go up and down and employs a “studio manager”. Maybe I should get one ­– that must be where I’ve been going wrong. He even has someone to squeeze his tubes – and that’s not intended as a double entendre. He’s quite good at shoes. I think these portraits are meant to be seen as an ‘installation’ and not individually ‘interrogated’. It’s just as well. Hockney is another painter who has never let a happy accident enliven his pictures. What a plodder.

    But who am I to slag off a national treasure. Well, I suppose it’s because I’m so bitter and twisted I recommend a good slagging off. It’s much more fun.

    A few years ago an artist and good friend of mine, Whingeing Loser in fact, wrote a critical piece about some aspects of the art business, which he showed to someone connected with his local arts council. “You do realise,” this worthy said, “that if you publish this your career will be over.” To which my friend replied, “What career?”.

    Thus was born The Dreadnoughts, we who will slag off anyone. Fear us, we are the future.

    Now, some notes on my recent beauty panels…

    I like to have things unfinished and go back to them later, sometimes years later, and then I know exactly what to do with them. It’s a good way of avoiding the demon of preciosity which can creep up on you and has a paralysing effect.

    Every 20 minutes or so I like to take a break, wander into the front room, see what’s going on in the street. Check how the sukebind is coming on. It’s slow to flower this year but the beans are doing well.

    I do a lot of work from the video screen these days. You have to work fast because if your equipment is anything like mine it jumps after about ten minutes. It’s just like working from life without the chalk. I get a lot of films from my friend Kenny, who runs an exotic shop on Goodge Street, and I’ve done a fair bit of ‘Gonzo’ stuff but I find it rather formulaic. I prefer the transitional movements when the figures are moving between partners and may be a bit off-balance. It would be hard to capture any other way except through photographs but that means you are using someone else’s choice – by stopping the films the choice becomes your own.

    I’ve been working on my men recently ever since Laura Gascoigne described mine as ‘cyphers’. I think she was right but they’re much better now. I got into this way of working because I like to draw the nude, but my nudes have to be doing something. I can’t stand pictures of some poor woman shivering by a radiator.

    In the past the use of nude models served to illustrate mythological themes but those times are long gone. So what, I ask you, do people do with their clothes off? I recommend that you pop along to Kenny’s and discover some rare and wonderful things.

    Dick French
    The Jackdaw Sept/Oct 2016