I have spent a day committing to oblivion by far the greater part of a man’s whole life’s work.
I have spent a day committing to oblivion by far the greater part of a man’s whole life’s work. Let me start this story at the beginning.
Donald Young, my uncle, died 21 years ago. Lung cancer killed him at 66, an age he was lucky to reach, given the pipe he had puffed at almost continuously since he was a teenager. The only other thing he had done continually since youth was paint. A working-class boy with a bad stammer, he had taken a scholarship to study at the Slade school of art in Chelsea, and from then until his death (there was a half-finished painting on the easel) he kept painting: on canvas, and when money was short, which was for most of the time, on hardboard. It was all he did.
He wouldn’t promote himself, wouldn’t go to parties, was terrified of exhibitions, detested all talk about the arts and, having turned his back on one social class, declined to enter another. His life was solitary except for a tiny circle of friends, and his truest and greatest friend all his life: my aunt Joyce. Auntie Joyce had baffled her parents (my grandfather was a prosperous south London butcher) and, their only daughter, continued to baffle them, by having married a no-hoper and supported him from their wedding day on, by working as a primary school teacher and teaching art. Don just stayed at home, painting and smoking. They rarely went beyond Margate, delighting mainly in their cat Snowball, a series of goldfish, and chess. Year by year the paintings accumulated. Two or three attempts at exhibitions that Joyce forced on Don failed to sell anything or arouse much interest.
By his death there were some 500 works, stacked everywhere in the Beckenham semi. The style? I don’t know what you call it. Self-portraits, nudes, crucifixions, figures, beach-scenes, landscapes… Don went through distinct periods, in which it’s possible I guess to see the influence of cubism, expressionism, Picasso, Cézanne, Lowry. Few of our family could (if we were honest with each other) make head or tail of it all. Grandma said the paintings didn’t look like anything she’d ever seen and in her view her daughter Joyce was the superior artist. Joyce said, and passionately believed, that she had married a genius. If Joyce ever had any doubts she never said so.
She survived Don by some years. On her deathbed — literally; I can still remember the hospital room, and where the window was — she asked me to promise that I would try to bring Don’s work to a wider audience; and I promised. My brother Roger and I tried, and failed, to organise a retrospective exhibition, then Roger (also an artist) had the basement of his house in Warwick damp-proofed and prepared, we hired a seven-tonne lorry, and in three journeys I drove Don’s life’s work from London to the Warwick basement. Here it has remained, stacked safe and dry in the dark, and hardly seen for 20 years, troubling Roger’s and my fraternal conscience.
But it so happened last year that, on my BBC Great Lives series, I met the art critic and writer, Brian Sewell, expert witness in our programme about Picasso. Through his writing and marvellous occasional turns on the radio I had expected to encounter a witty, knowledgeable and clever man, but a coldly disdainful — even contemptuous — person. I could not have been more wrong. I realised fast that Mr Sewell is kind and sensitive, someone who shoots a wonderful line in melancholy superiority but — though the sharp tongue and the elevation of discernment and technique are real — an old softie at heart.
By way of small talk I told him about Don. ‘I’ll come and have a look’ was his response. I was astonished. I doubt he was really interested in the work: I think he was just being kind.
So last autumn we went up to Warwick for the day, my brother’s anxiety hardly relieved by Sewell’s first reaction on viewing a few of Don’s paintings. Silence. Then: ‘This is a disaster’; then ‘Was your uncle mentally disturbed?’; then ‘It’s all such a horrible mess.’
But then he said this: ‘There’s something, fitfully, there. Mr Young needed a critic. His works needed an executioner. Your aunt did not help him with her uncritical admiration. You should burn about three quarters of these paintings.
‘A musician,’ Sewell continued, ‘practises constantly, tries things out. Nobody would suggest recording and keeping for posterity the rehearsals and the failures. It should be the same with painting. Winnow it down. Why don’t you spend a day selecting the best?’ Roger and I hesitated. ‘I’ll come back, and help you.’
Amazingly, he did. We spent last Thursday with three other friends in a gloomy basement in Warwick, taking turns to pull each painting from the rack, show it, then consign it to the ‘Maybe?’ or ‘Reject’ stacks. Then we went right through the Maybes, sorting these by style and subject and choosing the best within each category. We ended up with some 50 paintings — about 10 per cent.
Though we tended to defer to him, Sewell was neither peremptory nor bossy; while to all the rest of us, I think, what had started as an incoherent jumble began to resolve itself, and you saw the directions, the attempts, the obsessive cul-de-sacs, the indiscipline, the talent. Most of all you saw the absence throughout Don’s life of a second critical, knowing pair of eyes. I felt sad for Joyce, who tried so hard to do the best for him, and may only have hindered. ‘Everyone thinks I’ve been barmy,’ she said, dying, to me. ‘I want people to realise I wasn’t. And I want to see Don again. Not long now. Not long.’
It’s a strange and hollow feeling, stamping ‘pass’ and ‘fail’ in seconds, item by item, onto a body of work that was all a man lived for. I cannot think we’ll burn what we rejected, but we’ll put it away in the dark. Perhaps nothing will come even of what we selected: on balance that’s likely. It was not a glorious day. But the term ‘best endeavours’ springs to mind, and Sewell’s presence helped us believe as much. We did our best, Joyce. I can say that now.
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