‘A is a Critic: Writings from The Spectator’, by Andrew Lambirth – review

The following novel re-assessment is typical of Andrew Lambirth:

Although Eileen Agar exhibited with Miro, Magritte and Ernst, she was never a ‘card-carrying surrealist’. The origins of her work were rooted in ‘the great English Romantic tradition’ — medieval illumination, William Blake, Edward Lear.

Lambirth approaches painters and paintings not through the prism of current fashion but in the light of his extensive knowledge and through looking, intently and without prejudice.

It is what makes his weekly judgments in The Spectator always refreshing and his writing unlike that of any other critic since David Sylvester. This collection of his interviews, exhibition reviews and ‘reflections’, taken from his Spectator pieces over the past 15 years, is full of such perceptions.

In them his love of drawing, of colour and of technique yield fresh views on such established artists as Lowry, Sutherland and Freud. They lead him to reassess artists who are, in his view, undervalued (John Hubbard, Laetitia Yapp) and to retrieve the reputations of others who are in danger of being forgotten (Cedric Morris, Roland Collins, Alan Reynolds, John Armstrong).

He continually surprises: what other critic is interested in painters who work with writers (Wyndham Lewis with Naomi Mitchison; John Craxton illustrating Geoffrey Grigson’s anthology, The Poet’s Eye;  more recently the Royal Academy’s pairing of Norman Ackroyd with Douglas Dunn)?  Who else so consistently champions landscape?

In our secular age he is not afraid of spirituality as seen in our great cathedrals, praising Craigie Aitchison’s work in Truro, Christopher Le Brun’s and Elizabeth Frink’s in Liverpool and Antony Gormley’s figure in prayer in Westminster cathedral. He deplores ‘dogma and quick-fix skills’ and has little time for ‘watered-down conceptual art’.

He admires painters who engage in a dialogue between Englishness and modernism, citing Keith Coventry, Euan Uglow and Prunella Clough, and quotes with approval Maggie Hambling’s view that ‘drawing is very exciting, the most intimate thing’ and her perception that ‘a photograph has happened, it’s history, it’s gone.