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The savvy Mr Perry

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 4th June 2008

Unpopular Culture
De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea

But I couldn’t believe that the whole thing was simply a publicity exercise on behalf of Perry Enterprises, so I turned to the catalogue for further enlightenment. This is a handsome hardback volume of essays, pictures and poems, priced at £17.99 (special exhibition price £12.99). It contains a spirited essay by Mr Perry himself, an experienced and competent writer, and an intelligent commentary by the poet Blake Morrison. Mr Perry admits to choosing the exhibition’s title and claims that the art he has selected, roughly covering the period 1940–80, and the artists who made it, were not the subject of daily stories in the press or gossip columns, and thus could be accurately termed unpopular rather than popular. He then mentions the exception: John Bratby, who was a grand master at supplying the papers with stories and spicy titbits from his personal life in order to fuel his reputation and sell his art.

Bratby was in fact the first modern British artist to be a successful media manipulator, closely followed by that somewhat more photogenic limelight-junkie David Hockney, but Mr Perry is disenchanted with the 1960s and rules out any Pop artists from his selection. As he writes: ‘This is partly due to a suspicion that the swinging Sixties, in all its groovy glory, was really only enjoyed by a minority, and partly because I’m a bit tired of the hackneyed nostalgia for a psychedelic, World Cup-winning, Mini-driving, miniskirt-wearing, Beatles-loving supposed golden age.’

Mr Perry was born in 1960, and his selection breathes the more austere air of postwar shortages and rationing, evincing an aesthetic longing for the decade before his birth. Trawling the catalogues of the Arts Council Collection, he was drawn to ‘works that could be characterised as subtle, sensitive, lyrical and quiet’. Three separate categories of art particularly appealed to him: figurative painting, bronze sculpture and documentary photography. He writes: ‘I may be reactionary or nostalgic, but for me these artworks conjure up an age before our experience of ourselves was muffled completely by the commercial and sophisticated intermediaries of television, advertising and digital communications.’