Private View: The Lively World of British Art

"The surprising thing is that surely alongside this coffee-table book there should be companion volumes: a Private View (Paris) and Private View (New York) , but there hasn’t been, not specifically on this immersive scale as far as I’m aware. Obviously, there’s been lots published about New York as an arts capital, but nothing so vivid an encapsulation of a time and place as Private View by John Russell, Bryan Robertson and Lord Snowdon. Living in the far north of England, as I did then, to me Private View was my introduction to a wonderfully busy world of people achieving extraordinary things, a world centred on London. Snowdon’s telling photographs and John Russell’s text (as art critic of, successively, the London Sunday Times and the New York Times, writing in a slightly waspish manner) intrigued me at the time. Now all these years later, it looks to be a wonderful period piece. It’s a book which mixes illustration and photographs, very radically different photographs from what you might usually get in an art book, along with a certain lack of solemnity but a great deal of detail, some of it gossip – an admirable mix for any sort of art biography. The situation of the artists working in a big art centre like Paris, London or New York is that they lead lives of solitude during studio hours, and more often than not extreme sociability in the odd hours afterwards. You have to wind down and you have to see a bit of life. You need a social life and in Lucian’s case you have to have an amorous life too. All these things come together here, and this book was my prompt for getting involved in London. The writing of this biography did not depend too much on the London Library , that great public-private library, which allows you access to the shelves and which for writers of all kinds is a great asset to living in London. This was actually a book to be written not thanks to the London Library particularly, but in day-to-day conversations and in moving around and investigating what was happening. It was a very odd relationship. Initially, after I had written the first major magazine article on Freud in the early 70s, I became the art critic of the Observer . Which meant, as Lucian mockingly said, that ‘eternal vigilance’ was warranted. I did have to be careful not to appear to have my favourites and un-favourites. I had to serve the reader as opposed to serving the interests of anybody else, including my own. That meant that for the first fifteen or twenty years of my friendship with Lucian, this was a consideration. After I left the Observer in the late 90s however, when the idea of doing a short monograph on him had cropped up, I had already curated exhibitions with him and we were quite close. It was not out of the blue, but it was a change of direction that I was doing the portrait of Lucian and not the other way around. Lucian had inquired two or three times whether I should like to sit with him. No, I would not like to sit for him was my response, because I was the one behind the easel, as it were. This book developed, therefore, from being a short monograph into a longer book. The more we talked and the more I recorded him talking, the more it seemed that this was sort of an infinite resource and that I had to stick with it. Rather like keeping a diary I suppose. It was dutiful as much as anything else, even before it became a signed-up project with Bloomsbury, the publishers. “He wasn’t good in a hubbub” By that stage, the monograph was already ten years in the making, we’d already had ten years of me not writing the book. It was very disconcerting for me when he said he really couldn’t bear the idea of it being published. He did not like the sound of his own voice too much, and although I assured him it was good, he disagreed and didn’t like the exposure. I don’t blame him. It must be the most ghastly thing, having a book written about one without one’s control, not just from an editorial perspective, but just for the sheer scope of potential embarrassment all around. So it was understood that this would appear as a ‘novel’ after he died. I would continue and we talked and talked. Every afternoon as he knocked off from work for a bit, he liked to phone people he enjoyed speaking to: the art historian John Richardson in New York from time to time and a few more. All of us in our compartmented boxes, of course. It was this exclusive entrée, that was also non-exclusive, although none were committed to the book as I was. So I was special. He noted that. It’s a strange situation, sitting for a portrait, somewhat like going to the doctor but in reversed order. I’m speaking now as a seasoned sitter for paintings by Frank Auerbach. One turns up, gives one’s hours, enjoyably it must be said, as there’s conversation and part of the job of the artist is to be at least a little entertaining, keeping you alert and even keeping you awake. It’s intimate. Almost as intimate as going to the dentist. At the best of times, the exchanges can be illuminating. Imagine if Mrs. Siddons, prime actress, in sitting for Gainsborough, had had a diary going. Their conversations would have been memoir and gossip dizzily combined, I imagine. How good it would be to have such a soundtrack to the paintings. To be quoted sparingly of course!"