Anarchy in the UK
(and I don’t like Lucien Freud either)
It occurs to me that the trick to liking Jack Vettriano’s paintings is to catch one out of context. You look at the one above, “Amateur Philosophers”, and it’s quite striking. You’re immediately lost in the possibilities of a story there.
Unfortunately (well, I see it as unfortunate, and I’m far from being alone on this), when you take a few steps back and see the same work with its intended wall-mates, you get Vettriano’s story, which is a cheap, missed-the-point modern remake of a cheesy old B-movie, complete with garter belts.
So the philosophers having a confab in the painting above aren’t discussing their latest experiment in nuclear fission or their next mob hit — they’re arguing about which one of them gets to see Penelope in her underwear tonight after dinner.
The painting below, “Ghosts from the Past”, is the only other clue you need to assess Vettriano’s weight as an artist. Any mystery is gone, the mood spoiled. You’re at a bad play with no hope of a refund.
I like this one, even if the title — “Fetish (Study)” — is just more silliness.
You take an image like this and wonder about the man who painted it, so you visit his website (from which the photo below by Richard Kalina comes), and you swiftly lose hope again.
The Scotsman, now about 54, was a miner’s son but yearned for something better, blah blah blah. His girlfriend gave him a watercolour kit and he taught himself to paint.
For a while starting in 1979, says the Guardian, Vettriano worked as a management consultant in Bahrain while churning out paintings-to-order for the local expatriate community. He honed his skills in art as well as salesmanship.
The Royal Scottish Academy evidently overcame its initial mirth and showed and quickly sold some of his early pieces, and his own subsequent exhibitions around the globe have been big successes.
His popularity comes down, Dan Brown style, to this 1992 piece and its mass marketing. “The Singing Butler” was originally sold for £3,500, and four years later for £5,000. In 2004 it was auctioned for £745,000 and snagged him a royal honour “for Services to the Visual Arts”. It’s been endlessly reproduced on greeting cards, posters, coffee mugs and cookie tins and pulls him in £250,000 a year in royalties.
It’s so famous that, when the model for the dancing woman was identified, it was headline news. Jack Nicholson collects his stuff, and Jack’s got a lot of money. Below, “Olympia”, a portrait of Princess Anne’s daughter Zara Phillips, is a piece of crap done especially to raise money for Sport Relief.
“Even if one doesn’t take Vettriano seriously as a painter,” the Observer observed in June 2004, “one has to take him seriously as an investment.”
“Jack is not of the fine art world,” the Guardian quoted restaurateur and collector Sir Terence Conran as saying in July 2002. “I would never suggest Jack is a great artist in the manner of Francis Bacon. I don’t think he would claim to be. But he is an extremely competent artist in the Edward Hopper mould.”
Those are fighting words, but let Jack dig his own grave.
See the rest.
