Abstract
The William Boot tradition was alive and well in Fleet Street in the 1960s when I arrived from overseas seeking a job as a journalist. In Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop, Boot is sent off to cover a war in Africa, though as the country life correspondent of his newspaper, the “Daily Beast”, he is hopelessly ill-prepared for the task. When I was appointed industrial and economics correspondent in The Scotsman's London office in 1963 I was ignorant of both subjects and I still know nothing of economics. Reporters in those days were expected to learn on the job and a university education was exceptional.
How different it was for Richard Dorment when he arrived in London from the US in the 1970s. Dorment had studied art history at Princeton University and written a dissertation on Burne Jones's ceramics while doing graduate work at Columbia University. After three years as assistant curator of European painting at the Philadelphia Museum he moved to Britain to become a freelance writer on art and an exhibition organiser.
Reading the British daily newspapers he was shocked to discover the William Boot phenomenon. Few journalists who wrote about art knew anything of their subject, he wrote later. When they reviewed exhibitions they did little more than rewrite the press release. In December 1986 he sent a review of a David Hockney exhibition to The Daily Telegraph and was immediately offered the job of art critic. It was a post he was to hold with distinction and sometimes with controversy for 30 years.
His erudition is plain throughout his weighty book, which contains a wide selection of his reviews and ranges from an essay on Ice Age art at the British Museum to a discussion of the edgy social undertones he senses in the work of a little-known French impressionist Gustave Caillebotte (The Unknown Impressionist, at the Royal Academy, 1996).
Dorment is a genuine enthusiast. “Nothing I saw on television last week was half as exciting,” he writes of a painting by the American marine artist Winslow Homer depicting a rescue at sea. Of another marine painting, by Manet, he says: “Look for a few minutes and you may begin to feel seasick.”
As an American writing about British art he admits to having his blind spots, perhaps even his hates. He cannot stand Stanley Spencer. “There exists in Britain a passion for a certain kind of art that, to put it tactfully, finds no echoing sympathy in the foreign breast,” he wrote in 2001, reviewing Spencer at Tate Britain. He finds the figures in Spencer's giant painting “The Resurrection, Cookham” to be “whimsical, horribly self-conscious and not terribly well painted — a hair's breadth away from that bottomless pit of bad art, Beryl Cook”. “What a sad man Spencer was. And what a creep,” he adds.
The Bloomsbury painters get equally short shrift. Of Duncan Grant he writes: “I won't waste space ridiculing Grant's brainless imitations of Picasso, except to say that like all the Bloomsbury painters, he was a glorified decorator.” He dismisses Graham Sutherland as “the hollow man of British art”. But some more recent British artists are treated more kindly. At the Serpentine Gallery in 2002 he described Gilbert and George's The Dirty Words pictures as “among the most powerful works of art made in this country in the 20th century”. “For years now I've been saying that Gilbert and George are the most important artists to emerge in Britain since the war.”
Dorment joined the Telegraph at a time when drastic changes were afoot in the newspaper world. In 1986, Rupert Murdoch moved The Times, The Sun and the News of the World to Wapping. “Released from the stranglehold of the print unions, all British newspapers were able to increase the number of pages they printed,” he writes, “which in turn meant that more space was available to cover arts, features and sport. In time the impact of all this on museums and galleries would be incalculable.” Writing on art in the dailies became much livelier as critics reported on, and took sides for or against contemporary art, “and sometimes incited the culture wars that raged in Britain in the early 1990s”.
Dorment is not an angry critic. On the whole, his essays are supportive of their subjects, and not at all conservative. He reserves his real ire for those curators and catalogue writers who try increasingly to impose politically charged readings on their exhibitions, and from his pen flow expressions such as politically correct, Marxist drivel and pernicious nonsense. Only in this way does he conform to the Telegraph stereotype. In every other respect he has been an enlightened voice on the British art scene and this is a wonderfully entertaining book.