Richard Canning
Art Attack
Outsider: Always Almost, Never Quite – Volumes I & II
By Brian Sewell
Quartet Books Vol I 344pp Vol II 300pp £25 each order from our bookshop
Naked Emperors: Criticisms of English Contemporary Art
By Brian Sewell
Quartet Books 368pp £15 order from our bookshop
Coming across octogenarian art critic Brian Sewell’s late appeal to Truth in Outsider II, his second volume of autobiography, I thought of Keats’s familiar equation of Truth with Beauty (‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’). Sure enough, a paean to Beauty soon follows, in Sewell’s reflections on the flawless skin of the young and the ‘ridiculous’ responsiveness of the elderly to the allure of youth. Truth and Beauty propel these books, and are present on every page.
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