Jack Vettriano; what the critics don't dare to tell you.

Jack Vettriano ; The Singing Butler

 In a recent post I bemoaned the fact that critics are seemingly incapable of looking with their eyes at pictures, preferring instead to look with their brains. By which I mean they acquire prejudices through the process of their "education" (I put this word in inverted commas because it ought to mean, to draw out, whereas in fact the education of a modern art critic is far more concerned with stuffing in all sorts of approved and sanctioned opinions about what is and what is not acceptable). Nowhere is this more strikingly illustrated than by their treatment of the most famous and most successful realist artist in the UK today, the Scots artist Jack Vettriano. I will talk more specifically about Vettriano further on but its worthwhile taking a moment to speak more generally about the way modernist critics deal with realism.  All realism puts the modern critic in rather the same quandary I was in as a 13 year old who knew I would get kudos from listening to and liking Pink Floyd but was too ashamed to admit, (almost even to myself) that Abba wrote some pretty good tunes as well. The modern critic will (rightly) praise the "penetratingly meticulous observation" of Van Eyck but feel compelled to pour scorn on "academic niggling" of Holman Hunt. What is praised in an approved artist is condemned in an unapproved one. The beautiful finish of say, Corregio, becomes the "peinture laché" of Bugoureau. It is, for unexplained reasons, perfectly acceptable for a sixteenth century Venetian to be inspired by ancient Greece but totally unacceptable for a nineteenth century Londoner, despite the later actually having far greater knowledge and understanding of Greek art and culture.

 One feels a certain trepidation on behalf of the modernist critic writing about the art of the past lest he or she should inadvertently commit some ghastly faux pas by forgetting the approved list. Whistler is ok obviously as a rebel who sued Ruskin aka "the establishment" but Whistler loved Albert Moore, who painted classical nudes and exhibited at the Royal Academy and therefore is to be condemned as reactionary. The inevitable result is that Whistler's admiration for Moore is expunged from the official history and their relationship twisted to make Moore the humble but conservative acolyte of the avant-garde hero, and this despite Whistler's often stated respect and admiration for Moore's work.  When it comes to modern painting though, and here I use the term "modern", unfashionably, to denote an historical period rather than an artistic style, the critic is on surer ground. No danger of committing the terrible error equivalent to my singing "Fernando" in the playground! Rule 1 of the modernist handbook states that any figurative modern work which makes any reference to art of the past except to undercut or satirise it is strictly forbidden. The result of this rule being strictly enforced is the complete absence of modern figurative work from reviews and general art criticism in the press and on television except where it is characterized as amateur art and more or less ridiculed.

Pendine Beach: Jack Vettriano

Realism of all sorts poses a problem for critics for modernism came into being essentially to kill it off. The greats of previous centuries would remain forever in the museums but they could be intellectually cordoned off into an area called "the past", year zero was declared , sometime around 1910, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, and art would never be, and never be allowed to be, the same again. Realist art in the late 20th and 21st centuries must be a horrible torment to modernist critics who thought they had ridiculed it into oblivion. The problem they have with an artist like Vettriano is that to discuss him at all means to accept the traditional criteria for judging art. It makes no sense to talk about his work without dealing with how he handles tonal masses, his use of colour, his method of applying paint and so forth. This poses two problems. Firstly, the modern critic is almost without exception totally unqualified to discuss these matters never having actually studied the difficult art of painting a picture. Secondly, (and more seriously, because the modern critic is a sophisticated creature and never normally lets a complete lack of qualifications weaken his belief in the rightness of his judgements) once this is admitted it is not enough to say, oh but his colour harmonies are crude  his drawing clumsy, his composition awkward, for the realist will be inclined to respond incredulously; "but here is an article where you praised Tracy Emin's drawing, or Howard Hodgkin's colour or David Hockney's composition all of which are infinitely clumsier and cruder than Vettriano's, besides, if those are the qualites you want here are fifty successful realist painters who can give it too you in spades! Where is your modernism now if all along it has been drawing, colour and paint handling you really seek rather than merely juvenile attempts to try and make us think about this or that banal concept!

Just Another Day: Jack Vettriano

The result of this dilemma is that the critics do the only thing they can do with Vettriano, which is to almost totally ignore him. A scan of the internet reveals no serious reviews of his work in which its merits and de-merits are properly discussed. No doubt much to their chagrin though, they cannot get away with the usual way of dealing with realism, (and realism of a much greater quality than Vettriano's) which is to pretend it doesn't exist. In Vettriano's case his work is everywhere, even people who don't know his name will be familiar with some of his pictures so just occasionally they have to hold their noses and take him on. Not that they deign to actually review his work, that would be opening too great a can of worms; the only time they have descended from Olympus to write about him is not to review an exhibition but to criticize a gallery (the Kelvingrove in Glasgow) for mounting one and in the case of Jonathan Jones in The Guardian to deny his right to merit the title of artist at all!

So having criticised the critics for failing to look properly at pictures with an open mind  I thought I would put my money where my mouth is and apply this concept to the work of probably the most reviled painter, (possibly also the most liked it must be added) in the UK, Jack Vettriano. Like most of us I see prints of his works all the time, in friend's houses, dentists' waiting rooms, cafés and bars and I have to say I have always thought they had a certain quality. The thing that strikes me most forcibly, a vital thing for a painter one would have thought, but a rare gift nowadays even amongst good realist painters,  is his ability to create a telling and powerful image. Regardless of how skillfully they are put down on canvas Vettriano has created images which I believe are genuine contenders for the "once seen, never forgotten" club, and that is a club of very exclusive membership. The picture at the top of this article, his most famous work, The Singing Butler is a case in point, it has, to my mind, a compelling mixture of homeliness and familiarity with just the right amount of strangeness that beauty always seems to require. Some time ago critics gleefully discovered that some of the figures were taken from a reference manual as though that fact invalidated the picture but so what,? Renaissance artists did the same, swapping studio drawings of drapery and the like, the skill as Vettriano correctly asserted, is in how the figures are used, and how they are put together, the hue and value used for them and the negative shapes around them. I say he showed a level of artistic skill in his use of these figures to create so arresting an image at least equal to anything demonstrated by that darling of the media "Britain's greatest living painter" David Hockney

The memorability of an image is dependent on much more than what is portrayed obviously. when we call a picture "good" we mean it is composed with a level of artistic skill, which in turn means simply that the right colour has been used in the right amount in the right place. That is on a technical level what is primarily  meant to paint a good picture and I would maintain that Vettriano often succeeds to a high level on this test. To take the picture "Just Another Day" above, it is made, on an aesthetic level, by the lovely red notes of the handbag and hat. Now the artistic skill here is to pick a colour to play against the neutrals which allows a high enough chroma and low enough value to give sufficient contrast but also to allow the reds to be read as part of the single low value mass of the figure and the railings. The railings incidentally also perform the task of taking the dark mass across the picture without blocking the whole thing into two and disturbing the connection between foreground and background.  A little mention too for the delicious red strap cleverly linking the two larger red masses and adding a certain symmetry by mirroring the slight curve of the girl's  body. It is this kind of judgment which defines an artist's skill and I think this one picture alone is enough to illustrate the ludicrous nature of the critic Jones' comment mentioned above.

Self -Portrait : Jack Vettriano.

This near monochromatic self portrait demonstrates more clearly still Vettriano's ability to handle values, which are the key building block of any picture, the sine qua non if you will, of good art. Judged merely in those terms this is a wonderful picture, almost Whistlerian in his handling of values and I think perhaps the general position of the figure as well as the detail of the picture frame at the top right is a nod to the American artist's famous portrait of his mother, perhaps even it is not too fanciful to read in his dejected pose a sense of self criticism in failing to live up to the masters of the past. I don't know if that is any more than my interpretation but if so I would rather praise the artist for aiming for the highest than criticise him for falling short. Because of course there are shortcomings and I wouldn't put Vettriano in the same rank as Whistler to name but one great from past centuries.  One weakness it appears to me, though I must add the caveat that I am judging only from reproductions never having had the opportunity to see an original, is that Vettriano's method of laying paint on the canvas is rather basic and misses the opportunity of exploiting the wonderful range of textures possible with oil paint, the huge extension of effects one can gain by glazing, scumbling and juxtaposing opaque and transparent or semi-transparent paint for example. In this picture for example the pillow seems rather flat and the paint, considered as paint, is generally rather dull and lifeless.

 

Mad Dogs: Jack Vettriano

This lack of technique is perhaps most keenly felt in his treatment of flesh which is rather summary and for an artist especially is rather disappointing when one considers what a master such as Titian might have made of a scene such as this. But perhaps it is unfair to use that particular stick to beat him with, to say he falls short of Titian is after all only to say he trails behind possibly the greatest exponent of oil paint who has ever lived. I prefer to dwell on the positive and an honest view of his work tells me that whilst technically not by any means a great painter he is a very talented designer one of the best at work today, far superior to the likes of Hockney  or other moderns who paint broadly within the realist tradition and frankly far superior too to many classical realists of today who too often can handle paint like angels but have precious little idea how to make a picture. And this after all is the name of the game, to have something to say and to say it as beautifully as possible. Vettriano's great and to my mind deserved success is due entirely to the fact that he knows how to compose and make an image which speaks to people, they may be songs in a minor key but they are tunes people love to whistle as they go about their daily lives and that is no little achievement and merits far more respect and admiration than the art world has shown him.

Birth of a Dream : Jack Vettriano