The Morton Report - ArtScene Archives

ArtScene: Damien Hirst, Prince Philip and Me

2012-04-16T17:00:00Z

Florence, April 2. All done! Finito! Portocinqo! Eta nichivo, nichivo, nichivoya! One month locked away painting. The first three canvases of The Italian Job - just 35 to go by 2013. Ronnie turned up on the Third Day (her life long ambition) and I slammed and bolted the door on her.

I’ve got three mobiles. Two landlines. Two websites. Two secretaries and a studio that was feeling unloved. So, I’ve done what I should have done last year: locked myself away to paint. It’s what I do but I was forgetting. Through the broken window Ronnie says by the way she’d seen a Lucy Freud preview and wanted to throw up. Such are the children (even half children) of the famous. When I’m painting I don’t do by the way. Ronnie then said had I got a match and she’d tell me the really big news that if I hadn’t been a hermit since March I’d know anyway.

Coughing on the end of a Gitanes and waving a bottle of something you mustn’t let drip on your shoes she said my portrait of Prince Michael is to be in the Royal Society of Portrait Painters annual show at the Mall Galleries and ain’t that good?

Absolutely wonderful. Must clean the brushes and fly.

London. April 7. I met Prince Philip at the Eccentric Club dinner (tell me, why is My Number One Fan a member of the Eccentrics?) and he, HRH, asked me where I’d painted Prince Michael. I said in the North Library of the The Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall. HRH was not impressed. I think he thinks The Athenaeum has too many bishops. When you’re pushing 91 I’d have thought you’d want to keep that sort of company close by.

I get back to find the Roll Up! Roll Up! Man is in town - or to give it its proper description: Tate Modern and the Damien Hirst Show, a.k.a Retrospective. The much advertised media fest guaranteed to get the punters and the critics in a tiz.

Mr. Hirst is a businessman -- a juggling magician -- but certainly no clown. Given his manipulation of the art world and media, forget the ‘But how can this be art?” routine. Don’t even go there. If there are any strong points about Mr Hirst’s artistic abilities, perhaps they would find greater acceptance on stage and film sets, or even party planning, (I can recommend Rouge the best of the best events companies - their mini Crystal Palace in Hyde Park for fashion week was magical and Nicki Haslan’s birthday bash was just as a bash should be)…so what’s the difference in that and any performance art hmm? I digress.

Look, the sun is shining and Ronnie’s had laser treatment to stop her snoring so lets be kind. Damien is the man who was at the right place smack on time. What a laugh and what young art student from nowhere with a sure-footed ability to organize and a driving ambition would turn away mega offers? The artistic equivalent of junk bonding. He could not believe his luck!

This circus might amuse but there is little new to see: same old dots, saucepans, smelly rotting flesh (fascinating from a vegetarians point of view) even the poor shark sports a rather strained expression in a constipated kind of way. So, let the new wave critics stop getting jealous and grumps about him. Should you really want to make a statement about Damien Hirst’s work, don’t go and see it, don’t write about it, and don’t buy it! Gettit?

Did I go? Course I did. Just to check I was right. I was. Now to real art. I’ve got a dawn chorus business-class tomorrow. New York. The Guggenheim. Now there’s a place that gets it right.

ArtScene Quote of the Week

"I always ignore money." - Damien Hirst

Art Scene: Edvard Munch, Smiles and Screams

2012-02-24T14:06:54Z

London. The girl across the hall has a new personal trainer. He makes house calls. She says he's ex-Airborne. Ronnie says he makes crash landings. She says she shared a cab with him and the meter hadn't rolled before his hand was on her knee.

Now Connie's handled more sensational passes than even the 570 her all-time hero Brett Favre threw in that great Packers season of '95 - and she's old enough to have seen most of them. Connie may be right. I mean how many pilates classes break at 4am for donuts and skinny latte?

Connie says she saw the girl across the hall at Confession. She wasn't in very long. I suppose one subject covers all. We're sort of friends. We shared the only spare table at the Edvard Munch show at the Royal Academy seven years back. Then I saw her at the Musee d'Orsay one morning last October and she said she was coming back to London. She's from Dijon. Connie says that makes sense. "Looks creamy but no real taste you can put your finger on." Anyway, I told her when the apartment across the hall was vacant and that was that, neighbors.

So this morning, looking the worse for wear (or just maybe, better for it) she collapsed on my second best chesterfield as Anne Hathaway would have called it and started talking The Scream. Why not? That's when our hardly beautiful friendship began. She wants to know why it's so great and why could it fetch $80million when it comes up at Sotheby's New York .

Fabulous? She thought Not. Just crayons that worked on the day. There are many versions. Obsessive? She thought Yes. Could be. But that's was Munch. Look at his self-portraits. Can't fail to get more than a sense he must have lived his life preparing for death.

Was there ever a painter who did so many self-portraits? Well, ye ma'am. Rembrandt did 90. Van Gogh more than 30, Munch, maybe 70. That's a lot of self examination about age and a painter's human condition, which is what self-portraits are. Munch said it was a confession. So Connie asks the girl across the hall if she does self portraits. She has one of those fake slow smiles and slightly shakes her head. When she does her whole upper body moves. That's pilates for you.

My Number One Fan says artists do what novellists do: it's all about themselves. He said ever since Jan Van Eyck in the 15th century did maybe the first surviving self-portrait Portrait of a Man in A Turban, painters have been coursing their own decline to death. So where's he getting this? He must have read that somewhere because he knows nothing about painting. He confesses. He's quoting one of my columns. There's too much of that going on.

So what do we make of The Scream coming up? I think we should make $80million of it. It's Petter Olsen, a son of the famous Fred Olsen Line shipping company, who is selling the painting. He says its time for others to see it on regular display. Okay Petter. What happens if it's bought by another private art patron and tucked away on the bulkhead of an air-con superyacht? I supposed Petter may be disappointed but he can use the $80million to invest in a hotel and shrine at Munch's old Norwegian playground, Hvisten - just in time to cash in on the 150th anniversary of the painter's birth in 2013.

The girl across the hall smells money - more than personal trainers make. She asks how old Petter is. Connie says he's Norwegian so nobody knows. She's smiling that smile again and whispers off to get quality time pilates. Personal trainers are at least good time keepers. Mind you, maybe she's got something about The Scream. Could it be that it's just famous? Just iconic? Maybe it's not so good after all. Sotheby's are selling it in New York on May 2. I can hear Simon Shaw in the York Avenue boardroom chuckling. Not a masterpiece? He can give 80,000,000 reasons why it is.

ArtScene Quote

In my art I have tried to explain life and its meaning to myself. - Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch, Self Portrait in Bergen, above right.

Art Scene: Cezanne's The Card Players Sold

2012-02-08T14:55:00Z

LONDON. So, Cezanne’s, The Card Players, has gone for some $250 million. That could be on the low side. $300million is being thrown around. The final price could depend on currency prices when the deal was signed - apparently last year. It’s that sort of deal.

Most of us didn’t even know the painting had actually sold, although it was common knowledge that something was going on. That was last year. The then owner of The Card Players was Greek shipping magnate George Embiricos. He hadn’t long to live and wanted the Cezanne to go. He died before any agreement and his estate clinched it.

The buyer? Qatar. But don’t dismiss this as capriciousness by an oil rich Middle East royal family. This is not just something to hang in the super yacht. This is not a display of ostentation by the emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. Qatar is a very serious player in the world art market and importantly, how and where it is displayed. Not in secret but for as many to see as possible.

Qatar is the biggest single buyer in the world of contemporary art.

And, the emir understands perfectly where this big buy sits in the whole history of world contemporary art. When you buy Paul Cezanne, you’re buying more than a painting. Picasso said Cezanne was the beginning, “the father of us all”.

So let’s get the Qataris in cultural perspective. It has the Museum of Islamic Art, the Arab Museum of Modern Art and next week anyone with an ounce of contemporary art credibility should be in Qatar for the Takashi Murakami exhibition. The more than figurehead of the Murakami show is 28-year-old Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the daughter of the emir.

Apart from the drama of the affair, we have to think how we value such a painting. The Card Players was worth such a high price because it was one of the few Cezanne in this series in private hands. The others are in museums.

But it raises the question of valuation in this way: supposing a seventeenth century Rembrandt came to the market? What would it go for? No one can guess but it would be a massive amount more than the Cezanne. The sky may not be the limit in art sales, but there is a quiet competition running.

Not too many Greek shipowners are doing this sort of money. But watch the Gulf States, especially Abu Dhabi, Qatar’s neighbor and probably the richest city on the globe. The art lyric is more cheerful than the Bachmann-Turner album, Not Fragile but the sentiment is the same as the big title, You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.

So, we’re nibbling scallops in The Ivy and I’m wearing my try-to-look-intelligent frown & spieling all this to Connie, when she yawns. When Connie yawns, even her best mannered friends do a mental arithmetic job on what her whiter than white teeth must have cost. (I happen to know that it came in her second husband alimony deal and must have cost the price of a small Cezanne).

Connie does another yawn (make that two Cezannes) and says if the Qataris are such culture vultures how come they financed a chunk of the hit on Libya and now want to do a similar number on Syria? I mention that the Americans built a helipad on the site of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Okay, we’re into moral high-grounds too rarified for either of us. But events like The Card Players sale must trigger all sorts of moral thoughts. Why not? That’s one of the givens of great art. It’s about truth and deep down, we’re all a little uncomfortable with that.

By the by, mentioning Picasso, get a ticket to London to see Picasso and Modern British Art at the Tate 15 February thro 15 July. Sixty Picasso’s with modern British painters including Ben Nicholson, Wyndham Lewis, Francis Bacon and David Hockney. Quite a show and for most of us, easier than getting to Qatar or Abu Dhabi.

ArtScene Quote

Don't be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation. Paul Cezanne

ArtScene: Reflection, 1985, Lucian Freud

2012-02-01T18:35:00Z

London. You can’t go on being living famous. We all pop-off when Peter calls. Three score years and ten seems nothing nowadays, but the numbers don’t much matter. It’s what you’ve done when the bell tolls. The priest with the you’re-quite-safe-with-me watery eyes and wet lisp was telling me that on the Eurostar back from Paris.

He then added “So, we must be careful with our memories”.

Normally I don’t do philosophy on the first Paris to Pancras in the morning. Puzzling Le Figaro’s take on M. Sarkozy’s non-future and non-spill coffee is about me.

Then he says “Take your own portrait of our dear Prince Michael. I hear it’s being called forward for the Royal Portrait Painters show.” That’s a coffee spill moment.

A priest, a total stranger, clocks you on the 7.13am Eurostar? Sting? Set up? What’s a priest doing First Class anyway? He smiles. Wet lip smiles are a bit scary.

Then he explains: he was at the unveiling of the HRH Michael. At the back - he says. Do I believe him? I don’t think I do. Does it matter? Scary Number Two: we’re both going to London for next week’s Lucian Freud at the National Portrait Gallery. Must make sure my Number One Fan will be there.

So I take refuge in first year philosophy of life. Freud died last year. Every time I look at one of his portraits I remembering him saying that he was only trying to do what he couldn’t do.

The Lisping Father nods. He says it’s an ambition for us all. Maybe. I simply want to drink in Freud for as long as it takes. The NPG’s exhibition is one hundred and more paintings that Lucian wanted us to see. Why? Because these portraits were the people in his life.

The NPG could call it Friends & Lovers. Bit tacky? But add family and that’s what it’s about. He didn’t paint a picture. He painted the person. It could hurt. But the sitter knew when it was true. Lucian certainly did.

Look at his 1985 self-portrait and look carefully at the eye that follows you. It’s the left one. The dull one, not the sharp right eye. Was that Freud? Still with us?

I’m thinking this when I realize Mon Père Lisp is looking into my eyes. Oh dear! Maybe that’s what it was with Lucian Freud. The sitter is so much more than the image that walked into the studio. And when you can’t look into the face nor look at the body anymore? What’s left when the three score and ten are done? Freud made older bones (1922-2011) - few of them wasted. No, none of us goes on being living famous, or even living obscurity. But we leave much behind. We all do. Don’t ask the children. They know nothing until your dead. Ask the friends.

Go look at Freud at the NPG and see what he thought of his friends & lovers. Lucian Freud Portraits 9 February through 27 May.

ArtScene Quote

I paint people not because of what they are like… but how they happen to be -- Lucian Freud

ArtScene: Antigua and Hockney

2012-01-20T18:30:00Z

ANTIGUA. I’m in hiding. Well, sort of. My agent’s calling me about a piece in the London Evening Standard that I’ve been approached to do the first portrait of the Duchess of Cambridge. They say that they were taken with my portrait of Prince Michael in Kensington Palace and so I’m on the Maybe List for KM’s first likeness.

The Standard’s also quoted TMR about me having to learn to curtsy. For ten days I’m getting calls. Say nothing says my manager. Show some couth. You mean I don’t normally? “Couth duckie, do couth.”

So doing couth, I’ve been keeping the low profile in Antigua. Almost. I’ve been taking it oh so easy in the fabulous Jolly Harbour villa on Palm Point of my very good friend Bob P and his fabulous wife Simone, while my Number One Fan (supposed to be writing an Antiguan thriller about a CIA-pursued artist) fielded the calls. One cutie reporter even pretended to be Kate herself. (CIA ploy? Surely not?)

I had to come anyway to sign five big canvasses that having taken eighteen months to capture the people of this Caribbean tiara and to prepare for an exhibition in English Harbour next year.

The signing was brilliant. Bob P remembered the Krug, and Ronnie produced tins and tins of marshmallows - perfect signing lunch. Palm Point may not be Paradise, but you can see it from here. I could also see the clock. The BA flight always gets me from Heaven to the Hell’s Kitchen that is London in January right on time. How do they do that?

Hockney in London

Only one thing dragged me from Palm Point and the smartest white ketch anchored just off our beach: David Hockney’s’ monumental show at the RA in London. What a joy, what pleasure.

Hockney makes me happy. Outspoken, humorous, cutting intellect, great communicator, unafraid of change, grasping the latest technology and making it his own. Let’s hear it: Hockney is the most talented British artist of our time. Born in Bradford and forever grateful that he was taught in the days when you had to draw, not play with installations, he excels in this recent collection of monumental works, inspired by his home county of Yorkshire and seeing it all as if for the first time.

The scale of the works alone are enough to exhaust a man half his 75 years. When he’s not in his studio I listen carefully to his outspoken but crafted criticisms of the British art scene and, basic freedoms, even the taboo subject of smoking.

Want to smoke? Do it as long as you don’t harm anyone - a good nineteenth century harm philosophy. How refreshing I say. Always said with warmth and humour and a good dose of common sense. His Mum would be proud. We travel the world for inspiration, when what we need is right in front of us. We only need the eyes to see.

Last year it was Antigua for me. It was Yorkshire for Hockney? I feel insignificant. Hockney’s is big and better than brilliant. A Master. So go and see and be inspired. London’s Royal Academy: David Hockney A Bigger Picture January 21 to April 9, 2012. Miss this one and you’ll have missed something very, very special.

Now, does anybody know where I can buy Sobranie Black & Gold ciggies these days? Perfect with Krug.

ArtScene Quote

Always live in the ugliest house on the street - then you don't have to look at it. David Hockney

ArtScene: Ronald Searle

2012-01-05T12:00:00Z

Paris. Solly the Ragman rang from Draguignan. Did I know Searle was dead? Ronald Searle? Yes. What other Searle is there? Was there? And there we have it. There was only one. He invented St Trinian’s School, that establishment for smoking, drinking, straw boatered, skinny legged, black and bare laddered stockinged, knicker peeping school girls with more attitude than Mac Cobb’s great aunt at the height of her bootlegging days.

Those naughty and not always nice English school girls first appeared in 1941 and then in 1954 as the black and white movie, The Belles of St Trinian's, with the unforgettable, lugubrious-faced Alastair Sim dragged up as Millicent Fritton. Funny? Blue Murder at St Trinian’s was even funnier. Still is, more than half a century on.

Computer Bug

But don’t get lost in that humour. St Trinian's was a millstone because Searle was an uncompromising satirist. Look up his cartoons in The New Yorker. Look at his non-St Trinian's work: "Computer Bug" and "Gay & Sprightly" as examples. Look also at his war record. He was a prisoner of war for the Japanese and they put him to work on the ferocious ambition to build the dark historic monument, the Thai-Burma railroad. Maybe 120,000 died on that beast-minded project. Searle survived.

Gay & Sprightly

Did it make him different? Of course it did. None survived intact. What made him different? After all, there were great cartooning ideas after that post-World War II horror.

St Trinian's

First and foremost, Searle could draw - not a fashionable art form nowadays as the recent appointment of Tracy Emin as professor of drawing at London’s Royal Academy suggests. I heard that other wicked genius, Gerald Scarfe, say Searle was “clever and he was funny and he could draw. A lot of cartoonists come up with an idea first but Ronald could really draw." The St James’s gallery owner, Chris Beetles, reckons that Searle was a yardstick for other cartoonists. “Over my 40-year collecting and art dealing lifetime, I have never encountered a cartoonist with his consistency of drawing ability, and such an inventive range of humour from burlesque to surrealism."

Searle turned 90 last March. Some, sadly so, may even remark that he’d had a good innings. A good age. Maybe. There’s a big, weepy piece of me that says we can’t afford to lose an anarchist like him. Scarfe’s still there. Steve Bell too. But there aren’t many.

On a sitting room wall in my studio, there’s a self-portrait of Ronald. He’s lying on a couch, smoldering cigarette, whisky glass at hand. The long thin legs are high on the wall and he’s painting a face on one dirty bare foot. The title? "Artist at Work." Solly always tries to get me to sell it to him. Never. Certainly not now. It’s all I have of a genius.

ArtScene: New Year's Resolutions

2011-12-31T15:40:00Z

London: At about one o’clock this morning and just a half bottle of Calvados left, we played The New Years Resolution Game. Ronnie says she’s giving up smoking. (Or was that smirking? She’s 60-a-day croaky from Marseilles, so could be both.)

Guillaume is only on sulking terms with his droopy catamite he picked up in the Musee d’Orsay so that does not count.

Anton says he will not be here in 2012. Anton is an existentialist and has affected a lisp as his latest bow to the human condition and I really do regret giving him the book on Nietzsche.

My Number One Fan says he’s giving up buying shirts. He has 140 (according to the laundry lady) because he has a seemingly daily stripe-or-blank-blanc indecision complex.

The girl across the hall, I know, is giving up Italian boyfriends (including her own).

By 2am I’m thinking I’m surrounded by people who are not taking life seriously enough to realize that we’re all sliding into the most life changing year of the century so far.

What’s up, Doc? Just this: Eurozone Crisis can’t be fixed. EU is a college of incompetents who fiddle fish quotas while the Euro burns. IMF Lady’s a snappy dresser but no one listens to her. Merkel’s about to dump on Sarkozy and pull up the drawbridge.

So, it’s fallen to me to New Years Resolutionize and save the world — well, mine at least. Here’s the answer. T&CA, of course. Be at Bonham’s sale room in the pretty street opposite Harrods at 1pm 17 January next . They’ve got a sale of Modern British and Irish art.

Joan Gilchrist, who died just three years ago, was part of the group known as Cornish artists. Maybe the work has a certain greeting card simplicity, but she’s starting to be collectible. Bonham’s think her "Walking Near Lands End" could fetch as much as £2500.

There’s a Ruskin Spear, "Near Fonthill Gifford," that might be had for as little at £500. Okay, it’s just three black and white cows in a field but it would have cost more than that in the Royal Academy summer show. (Spear is an RA).

More to spend? Mary Fedden, another RA, always does well at Bonhams. Five or six thousand for "Bishops Smalls." Not for my walls, but a good investment. Same for Sir Frank Brangwyn’s "Sketch of a Centaur." Shouldn’t fetch more than £1000.

Two years ago, one of my oils sold for £8000 and is now valued at £13000. My Number One Fan bought a Pooh Bear Shepherd a few months back for hundreds and it’s now worth a couple of thousand.

When the economy wilts, the art market looks a good hedge and gives enormous pleasure. Much in the 17 January Bonham’s sale is affordable. City boys in London were spending many times the estimated total sale on their office parties a couple of weeks ago.

A Fred Uhlman, a Daniel O’Neill, and certainly a Mary Fedden make affordable investments that’ll turn a dollar quicker and safer than anything the City and Wall Streeters are recommending today. Better put hard to come by money on the wall rather than in their grubby pockets. Mmm?

Ronnie’s Zippo still won’t work so could be she’ll have enough change from her Gitanes Lites savings to get to Knightsbridge. Guillaume? He’s buying Rouquette liposuction, so no way. Anton? Existentialists don’t do paintings, only contemplative mortality. The girl across the hall prefers decorated ceiling mirrors, so maybe not.

Me? I’m in. I like cows.

See you there on the 17th.

ArtScene: Silver Medals and Non-Drawing Teachers

2011-12-20T19:25:00Z

Florence. Such a surprise. Summoned to this wonderful city of back-to-back Renaissance for the most magical moment in the Palazzo Vecchio a gilded stone’s throw from the Arno and given a silver medal. I teach here and in surrounding Tuscany each year. Odd isn’t it? Would-be painters from both sides of the Atlantic coming to this bit of heaven to be taught by a Scot. And I’m told, they’re already signing up for 2012.

Anyway, clutching my Number One Fan, flowers in one hand and the silver bling in its scarlet and gold box in the other, tripped light fantastic across the Palazzo della Signoria into Café Rivoire for Krug, espresso and calorie counting crème croissants that Revoire does better than anyone. These occasions create moments of their own.

I suppose it is a sensation that all’s right with the world and so there’s a need to be wrapped in unashamed splendour. I seem to remember lunch went on a bit (in Gilli’s?) and was followed by exquisite moments of warmth and little needing to be said. Then (still clutching silver) I was crossing the Ponte Vecchio and in awe, so silent that even a whispered 'Gosh!' would have broken the spell, I was ushered into the Palazzo Pitti and room after room and wall after wall of simply astounding paintings.

A who’s who of masters from any gallery in the whole world. Great classic poses, others frighteningly modern. All so breathtaking that it would take years to stand and stare. Instead, a slow parade of what art is sometimes about - awareness of colour in all its expressions.

This could only be Florence - a city of never ending bliss. Go quietly there during these European winter days and be utterly without the conga lines of tourists led by ladies with raised umbrellas.

Florence is to be seen with a slight chill in the air. Cross the Arno to the Palazzo Pitti, re-cross to Or San Michele with its eighth century origins and statues of the apostles and then, to the exhibition of bankers and culture mounted by the brilliant director, the British Canadian, James Bradburne.

London. How desperately sad, to return to London yesterday and the news that Tracey Emin is to be professor of drawing at the Royal Academy. Is there no one at the RA who knows that Tracey, as delightful a person and as good a teacher as she is, simply cannot draw? What is going on in that place?

A professor of drawing who can only squiggle - as her recent exhibition at the Heyward demonstrated. An empress with no artistic clothing. An Academy with no emperors. Pity, pity the students.

Heigh-ho. I must book my Eurostar asap. I’m due for the other Academy, the one in Florence of course, where they can really draw. Can’t wait. And if I arrive early, there’s always a moment to loiter in Café Rivoire and memories of a truly wonderful morning. Silver medal vanity. Why not? I’m only human.

ArtScene: Armistice Day, Fiona's Prince Michael of Kent

2011-11-11T18:15:00Z

Flanders. Wandering though the memories of hopeless war this week. Friday was the anniversary of the day in 1918 when the treacherous guns of World War I fell silent. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the war was over.

Not everyone was told. One hour later, the great uncle of my Number One Fan was killed by a German sniper.

On that same day, Hariet, the mother of Wilfrid Owen, perhaps the humblest of the Great War poets, was told that her son had been machined gunned to his death at the Sambre-Oise Canal.

These moments lay uneasily in the mind. The poppy became the symbol of the memories of that war and the pity of it all are refuse to lie down in the poetry of the likes of Siegfried Sassoon and Owen. The poppy bloomed across the Flanders fields where, I promise you, the souls of those who perished on both sides of the forward trenches still keep watch.

This year, I began sketches of the war. But I was not there. How ever could I attempt to capture the pathos in, for very good example, the work of the American painter John Singer Sargent. See his Gassed in London’s Imperial War Museum and see the blind leading the blind through the debris of lunacy. So, I abandoned the work.

But I’ve been asked to come back next year when the poppies bloom and paint them to illustrate what, I think, will become one of the most moving reflections on that terrible conflict. It’s not a morbid project. In all aspects of art there has to be truth and therefore hope, otherwise why go through the agony of doing it? The poppy symbolizes hope.

When I’ve finished, we will show some of it here in The Morton Report - smart, swanky, chic maybe, but never, never forgetting.

London. There’s always the lighter side of everything. My portrait of Prince Michael of Kent has at last had its unveiling. It’s now hanging alongside a portrait of the Queen, his first cousin. Loads of people with loads of fizz gathered round and all said the Okay things. Great. Fabulous. Looks like Tsar Nicholas. Superb painting (that’s more like it). But the question that had them all silent and waiting for an answer came from the daughter of one of my patrons: “Did you have to curtsey?”

I promise you, it was the biggest dilemma of the five sittings. I looked up protocol books. Went on line. What sort of curtsey does a paint-smocked artist with a hankering for a double espresso and Armagnac at ten in the morning do when a handsome prince comes into the studio?

The best bit of advice came from an old hand along the Privy Purse Corridor in Buckingham Palace. “You could curtsey, but not so low that your knees crack. Equally, you could simply bob. But whichever one you do, you have to make sure that HRH is aware that you’ve done it. Royalty feels royal. If nothing else, even a bob reminds them that you’re in no doubt who they are.”

What did I do? The first time I gave a quick curtsey. And? The knees cracked. After that a bob seemed fine. For us both. Now I’ve been asked about another royal portrait. Fine by me but…will the knees hold out for another five sittings?

ArtScene Quote

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Wilfrid Owen

ArtScene: Diego Rivera Murals at MoMA

2011-11-04T17:25:00Z

New York. I can only drink champagne nowadays. My analyst says it’s ancient Scottish grandeur coming to the fore. No such thing. It simply tastes good. But it has to be Krug. (Haven’t touched Krystal since Louis Roederer changed the spelling).

In the studio I drink it from a chilled pewter tankard just as my grandfather did. Elitist? I’ll drink to that. I mention this because Wednesday, was a Done It and Dusted Day. Brushes washed. Smock off. Phone back on the hook. Krug cork eased out with a whisper - not a vulgar pop. In other words, I’ve finished the Antigua commission. Five good size canvasses - 15ft by 8 ft. Big, brilliant Caribbean colours. Love it.

So, another lady-like slurp and I’m into does size matter and wondering at the murals of Diego Rivera about to show at the Museum of Modern Art. November 13 to May 14 next. This is going to be a memorable moment at MoMA. For the first time in eight decades, it gets together five of the eight “portable murals” Rivera created exclusively for his 1931 MoMA exhibition and, they’ve never again be brought together until now.

They’re really freestanding frescoes. Big. Bold images eighty years ago that are so relevant today. Why? Because these are heady subjects of the late Twenties and Early Thirties when America really did have more to fear than fear itself. These murals were debating the role of public art during the seemingly hopeless state of Wall Street’s economic crash, the cruel consequences of the Depression and, to show that the troubles did not come alone, the Mexican Revolution.

All this executed in the artist’s uncompromisingly style that does not allow you to look away from his most harrowing images including the wretched vision man’s most spiteful execution of power over another - corporal punishment

The murals, 6ft by 8ft weigh in at around 1,000 pounds. They’re in frescoed plaster, concrete and steel. Go see. You’ll not be able to escape them. That goes too for three of his eight-foot working drawings, smaller drawings prints and watercolours. Because the surface of a fresco panel dries quickly, Rivera used full-scale cartoons to develop compositions (something I learned from him) before applying pigment to the wet plaster which he would then transfer or replicate onto the murals surface.

Diego Rivera worked famously on the Rockefeller Centre project. It didn’t last and they showed him the door. Why? Probably Lenin. Diego wanted to exhibit a portrait of Lenin. Lenin was dead by then, but his image represented everything that FDR’s America was not. It has to go said the Rockefeller Centre. It has to stay said Diego. Either it goes or you… Diego went. Art is truth, but sometimes that’s a complex debate, especially when they’re jumping, even apocryphally, from the windows of economically besieged Wall Street.

So back to the pewter and the thought that MoMA’s backed its reputation with this show on its many levels - political, historical and artistically. My Number One Fan calls to say he’s found a Clos du Mesnil. He must have paid a year’s salary. But why not? Grandfather would have approved.

Thinking of ancient grandeur (really must get a more imaginative analyst - someone who doesn’t tell me what he thinks I want to hear). Next week I’ll reveal why the experts love my royal portrait, but really wanted to know how long it took me to perfect my curtsey.

ArtScene Quote of the Week

Only the work of art itself can raise the standard of taste. Diego Rivera

ArtScene: "New" Velazquez, Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven

2011-10-28T19:35:00Z

LONDON. Jimmy the Jesuit is swishing in his cassock. Steady, boy. But the excitement is innocent. He says have I been to Bonham’s Sales to see the long lost Velazquez?

In between fixing a tap, binning a faux mink thong sent by a Long Island pervert and, wondering why I have to do so much of my accountant’s work for him, the answer is: of course. Any script editor to this story would never believe it.

The descendants of a not so special nineteenth century artist, Matthew Shepperson, sent an attic load of his work to Bonhams here in London. In the box, something a bit different. A portrait of a gentleman - too good for a Shepperson.

Andrew Mckenzie at Bonhams says, "Shepperson's a fairly third-rate artist to be honest. As soon as we saw it we could see it was a picture of immense quality and the power of the image stood out."

Then what? "The costume is Spanish, so the obvious name to start with is Velazquez and his pupils. We ruled out the pupils because the technique just didn't seem to fit."

The next stop was The Prado in Madrid. "I looked at portraits of the same period: the way he models the cheek, very delicate modelling, cool colouring. The lips - very beautifully painted precisely the way Velazquez paints his lips."

It’s still a gamble, but everyone who knows about Velazqez says Velazquez. Comes up next month: £3million. Loose change for someone looking for something special for Christmas.

Back in the studio and more excitement. Can I cope with it all? No not Jimmy the Jez. It’s an email from one of my Canadian students, Kathy. Not the Velazquez but have I seen Tom Thomson and The Group of Seven at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. The Dulwich was England’s very first purpose-built public art gallery founded in 1811.

The Group of Seven was early twentieth century, Tom Thomson, and his seven friends: J E H MacDonald, Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer, Frank Johnson, Franklin Carmichael, AY Jackson and Fred Varley. The progress of this informal Canadian art movement was curtailed by the First World War and the early and mysterious death of Tom Thomson in 1917 during a canoeing trip in Algonquin Park. Drink taken? Peeing from his canoe? Toppled over. That’s what they say.

The exhibition is curated by Ian Dejardin, director of Dulwich Picture Gallery with Canadian co-curators, Katerina Atanassova the chief curator of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and visual arts professor at Toronto’s York University, Anna Hudson. It’s an east to west journey across Canada. The grand thing about the show from a painter’s point of view, is the juxtaposition of the finished canvas with the initial sketches, done on the spot.

It’s bold and bright, dramatic and gutsy. So it’s as uncompromising as the landscape that gave them birth. These artists were not afraid of handling paint or colour but are not much talked about outside Canada. They should be. But that’s how insular, even precious, the art world can be. .

Dulwich is showing 122 paintings, some of which have never been on public display. Go see. The Dulwich itself makes it a worthwhile trip especially for those who think it’s all in central London.

By the way, if you happen to see a twitching Jez, don’t worry. It’s just another excited art lover - I think.

ArtScene Quote of the Week

The maples are about all stripped of leaves now, but the birches are very rich in colour... the best I can do does not do the place much justice in the way of beauty. Tom Thomson

ArtScene: Turner Prize at Gateshead, First Actresses in London

2011-10-21T17:55:00Z

GATESHEAD. The fat woman in knee socks and wide apart running quarterback legs was stuffing herself with the dirtiest beef burger seen/smelled on a British train. Guillaume (no beauty himself with that mole disappearing into his third chin) did retching noises and scurried for the corridor with his worried catamite mincing behind. She burped goodbye. Nell Gwyn with her cherry ripe nipples she wasn't.

Guillaume and his acolyte had tagged on for the train ride north. This horribly sneering Parisian (why do I put up with him? In '81 he saved my life, that's why) once had a job in a London gallery coffee shop and believed anything north of the capital was injun territory. So I was taking him north to, of all places, Gateshead. Why leave the buzz of London galleries and fabulous cocktails for Gateshead? Answer: Because it's Turner Prize Award time and for the first time in its 27-year history, the Turner Prize show and awards ceremony is being held outside of London and the Tate orbit.

But Gateshead? Does it work? This year’s show is well hung (as they say up North) at the Baltic Gallery. Yet as the eyelids droop in anticipation, some things are different. Firstly, the shortlist of four, George Shaw (painting) Martin Boyce (installation), Karla Black (Installation) and Hilary Lloyd (film and still photos) and perhaps with one exception, display work that is interesting, original and technically of an uncompromisingly high standard. Hooray! That’s a good start.

This is a biggy award in UK terms. The winner of Turner 2011 gets £25,000 at a ceremony on the 5th December held at the Baltic and the judges this year know their stuff. Who will win? The young Karla Black interests me. I wish her the top marks but something says she comes under the 'Not Yet' category. There are clearly two contenders: Martin Boyce, a pleasurable experience (rare in an art installation these days) and George Shaw. Shaw's subject matter's a wee bit bleak but he is obsessed and we like that, and wait for it, his paintings are realistic! Now there’s a turn up.

LONDON. Now back to the belching slut on the 7.55 London to Newcastle flyer. I'd seen her the day before. She was the woman in turquoise taffeta with the tag-wrestler's gait at the National Gallery in London. On the way to my studio, I'd dropped into the wonderful National Portrait Gallery (it's like seeing old friends) to get an early sight of The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons. It's in the NPG's Wolfson Gallery until 8 January next.

The crowd pulling title and one that should not disappoint with 53 portraits, some never seen in public before, including Nell Gwyn, Lavinia Fenton, Sarah Siddons, Mary Robinson and Dorothy Jordan, by artists such as Reynolds, Gainsborough, Hogarth and Gillray. The gallery says that the bare-breasted Nell Gwyn is yet another 'discovered' portrait. This one's by the late seventeenth century painter, Simon Verelest.

The burger queen said that the jolly freewheeling Victorians simply couldn't cope with courtesans with big bare boobies, so painted over Nell's best-remembered assets. A clean up jobby in the twentieth century restored the lady to her full glory. Clearly, after more than three hundred years, Nell's still the main attraction.

I have to report that burger lady, with a fixed stare at Guillaume's second jowl made a very good point: "good portrait painters tell the truth. Photographers tell you what you want to see." Guillaume's catamite giggled. Guillaume, wonderfully insulted, rushed off to the corridor to be sick again. I think I like my new bestest friend in turquoise taffeta.

ArtScene Quote

The real character of a man is found out by his amusements. Joshua Reynolds

ArtScene: Gerhard Richter Panorama

2011-10-14T19:15:00Z

London. At one of those smart dinner parties last night. I should have been warned. "We are rather intellectual," said the hostess with a too silly shrill.

"But I do hope you'll come." In other words I'm not. They are. So why go? I knew one of the diners was about to bid zillions for Indian art and I wanted to find out why. Okay? Nil OK. He didn't show.

So, I'm sitting next to a forty-something acne culture who says he's a poet. I mean, if you have to say you're a poet then at the best you're hoping to be one. Festes on the other side simply has knees trained to lean against my thigh. He thinks he’s one-liner funny. By twelfth night he may get there. He says he's writing his second novel. But of course, he says, no comedy. Comedy does not win book prizes. Everyone seems to know that. Course they do. They're intellectuals.

They're talking about some man's Booker Prize. Rubber knees cannot quite believe he's not short-listed. The Bard's chewing mange tout strained, by the sound of it, through his adenoids. A woman opposite wearing someone else's hair seems to have been a judge last time round. She's quite ugly. The nose has Made in Geneva written all over it. She asks what I'm reading. I say the Tate Modern Gerhard Richter catalogue. She says “How very odd.” The knee rubber leans away. "Oh. Art. I know Tracey quite well - so very good." I remember I'm in Notting Hill. I plead contractions and leave.

They have nearly spoiled my day. But how could they? I've spent the afternoon at the Tate Modern with Gerhard Richter. Everyone should. This is probably the most significant exhibition here in London this century so far. (Gerhard Richter: Panorama) I think Gerhard Richter will be shown to be the most important modern painter of our times.

Go look. Throughout this show you can see progressively how Richter has grappled with the dilemmas facing the modern artists of today and he really has remained committed to the medium of paint throughout his career. From super realism to his large abstract paintings we see how he blurs and questions the reality of what we see. Where does reality end and abstraction begin? All done through the language of paint, not pompous Booker words.

This show is to be a sort of 80th birthday celebration - Richter was born in Dresden in 1932. The challenge of the painter is to express reality. After all, truth is an expression of reality. That’s very dangerous ground to tread. Remember his black and white paintings based on images of the Baader Meinhof gang? Just as he reflected an inescapable reality on canvas, the coming of Hitler, so he does in the last room at this exhibition, exploring a modern disturbing phenomena - 9/11.

Richter's works are executed with exquisite precision and attention to surface quality. This man works in a quiet and persistent way. You need to get on first name terms with it. The exhibition was packed and I had to use both elbows to peer hungrily as close to the images without setting the alarms off. Too much to take in for one visit I left the show salivating. I shall be back. Again. And again. See you there until 8 January.

ArtScene Quote

What counts isn’t being able to do a thing, its seeing what is. Seeing is the decisive act, and ultimately it places the viewer and the seer on the same level. Gehard Richter

ArtScene: Rodin's The Kiss at Turner Margate

2011-10-08T17:20:00Z

Margate. Ronnie’s third ex said she could have kissed Michelangelo’s David into life. Given his teeth after the Munich beer fest fracas and his boutique halitosis (her ex, not Michelangelo) I’m surprised he ever got to find out.

Now we’re standing in front of the biggest kiss in the world. Four and one half tonnes of entwined bodies and more than seven feet tall. Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss. Ronnie says she wants to touch it, it’s that erotic. Whatever wets your lips.

Rodin never thought much of The Kiss, but apart from The Thinker, it’s what he’s best known for. I much prefer his wonderful drawings and watercolours, quite sensual in their nature and, in the words of the man himself, “It’s quite simple, my drawings are the key to my work: my sculpture is merely drawing in all the dimensions.”

Like many sculptures, the artist did more than one and this Kiss has a curious history. It was commissioned by an American classical Greek speaking oddball, EP Warren, son of a wealthy Massachusetts paper maker. EP set up home in the town of Lewes just along from the sometime Regency watering hole, Brighton.

He bought in and shipped back to America works that were supposed to be antiquities. Many were common Italian forgeries. These were the early 1920s. Everyone was faking it. Warren offered The Kiss on loan to the local museum, but the good people of Lewes (the Lake Wobegone of southern England) were so appalled by the near-earth eroticism of Rodin’s work, that they covered it up with a sheet.

When Warren died, The Kiss went to auction but didn’t reach its £,9000 reserve. It ended up on loan to The Tate and in 1955, the museum bought it in for £7,500. Today’s value £12-14million minimum. For the moment, it’s on loan again - this time at the new Turner Contemporary Gallery in south east England coastal town of Margate.

The new gallery is the ideal setting. Rodin’s masterpiece is in the most wonderful natural light reflected by the sea and huge uninterrupted skies through tall clear windows. The gallery is named after JMW Turner who lived in the town while he painted the raging winter seas so common along this Kentish foreland (Turner and the Elements opens 28 January next).

Outside, the first autumn winds spat sea spray into our cheeks and hair. We muttered darkly at the waving arms of the giant offshore, windmills supposedly winding armatures of electricity to save our dull green and too often unpleasant land. Turner of course, would have been out there in the tippiest of dinghies in a Force 8 storm painting them as ghosts of insanity. If he had, we’d have admired both canvas and pylons - maybe even have called them works of art.

Margate is pronounced Margit by locals and called, Poor Old Margate by its fans. It’s one of those places that was always on its way up but forgot to do it. The Turner Gallery has stirred the optimists once more. The tea rooms are doing better business. Houses are cheap, but people from outside are starting to buy. Ask anyone, when the artists move in the neighbourhood moves up.

Ronnie says is just the beginning and as she’s had so many beginnings I assume she knows what she’s talking about. Can you do a kiss in marble? “O yes,” she says. “Ignore the tonnage, this one’s about to get going.” Not what Rodin thought at all. But maybe the people of Lewes were right.

If you can, take a train from Platform 4 at Charing Cross to Margate. Worth the detour.

ArtScene Quote: A large sculptured knick-knack following the usual formula - Rodin on The Kiss.

ArtScene: Munch and Fra Angelico in Paris, Leonardo's La Bella Principessa

2011-09-30T15:25:00Z

PARIS. Guillaume is a fraud. Has to be. The lover who ran off with a priest is back. Said the priest wasn’t sincere. Come again? We’re supposed to be looking at the Edvard Munch, l’oeil moderne 1900-1944 at the Centre Georges Pompidou. But one half of me has the bleatings of lovesick Guilllaume (why he never accepted the offer from le boucher de Avignon, I’ll never know) and the other my Question of the Day: why did Munch do so many self-portraits?

Guillaume starts a line with the droopy youth with the ear phones and I escape to the boulevard Haussmann for a quick peep at yet another Fra Angelico Masters of Light at the Institut de France’s Musee. Both worth a look before they close in January but there are no longer surprises even in these geniuses 600 years apart.

Mind you, this is the first time that the French have devoted a whole space to Fra Angelico. We have here 25 paintings and that’s a lot when you consider the period and the complexity of gathering an exhibition like this.

Could be the equal attraction is in the supporting room of painters who would have known Fra Anglico - Lippi, Uccello, Monaco et al. All there until 16 January next year and well worth the ten euros. Rico, who always hangs round the Jacquemart-Andre says it’s still the worst coffee off the Champs-Elyees but he’s got a new place that no one we know knows.

The coffee smells good as soon as the door opens and Guillaume’s sitting in the corner with the droopy kid with the ear-muffs. G turns his back on us pretending we’re not there or something. Rico says don’t worry. Live in the skin. Everyone’s a fraud but maybe the fraud’s better than the real thing and do I think La Bella Principessa is the real thing? I say it could be? Then, why, isn’t it in the Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery in London. (It opens November). He’s right.

La Bella Principessa is a wonderful painting but, for years it has been argued over with a bunch of people saying it was not a Leonardo but a German pretend - probably nineteenth century. Now, Oxford’s Professor Emeritus, Martin Kemp, says that there are three stitching holes down one side that suggest it is from a book of paintings owned by Leonard’s patron, the Duke of Milan.

Just along the boulevard from us (or more or less) is one of the better fine art laboratories and Kemp and the lab’s chairman Jean Penicaut have been working on the book and have found…ta-ra-ta-ra!!! a missing page and, Poirot old bean, a dab on the canvas that matches Leonardo’s finger print found on St Jerome and, that has to be the real thing because it’s in the Vatican. (Am I really saying this?).

This portrait with serene expression of the girl, the wonderfully detail of the elaborate pigtail and mostly, the eyes, tell me I want this to be La Bella Principessa. And it should be in the National Gallery’s exhibition. Imagine putting it on a separate wall, all alone and beside it, the brilliant detective yarn that has produced it. Could be worth $100 million and could be the greatest art discovery (or forgery) ever. Never mind the rest of the exhibition. This is the one the public would want to see. The painter’s alchemy or gold.

So we leave for the Gare du Nord and maybe just in time for a wonderful bouillabaisse in the Nord Terminus. Another glass and maybe the next train. That was it? OK. Friday will do. Just sit in silence. Just imagine it really could be a Leonardo. Very special. Tell the world.

ArtScene Quote of the week

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness. Leonardo