Lynn Barber is known as a distinguished journalist, but what she always wanted to do was hang out with artists. This book feels like a marvellous cocktail party, packed with the painters and sculptors Barber has interviewed over the years: Howard Hodgkin, Phyllida Barlow, Grayson Perry, Maggi Hambling. Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin eye one another warily from opposite sides of the room; Salvador Dali’s ocelot weaves between the guests; everyone, naturally, is smoking. Lucian Freud is a no-show – though having refused Barber’s many interview requests, he did send a scrawled note explaining he had no wish to ‘be shat upon by a stranger’.
Feuds and gossip are the making of any gathering, and A Little Art Education is not a book of art criticism. Barber likes what she likes, and though she is insightful on the works which move her, comparing David Hockney’s Yorkshire landscapes to the ‘visionary’ canvases of Samuel Palmer, this series of vignettes is as much about personalities as pictures. Barber has been a fascinated champion of artists throughout her career and deplores the fact that until the 1990s the mainstream British press was hostile to modern art where it was not bumptiously philistine. Over seven years at the Sunday Express Barber was permitted just two interviews with artists, one of which was, she regrets, with Rolf Harris. She moved to the Observer as the YBA boom began, turning artists like Emin and Damien Hirst into household names.
Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin eye one another across the room. Dali’s ocelot weaves between the guests
As a reporter, she honed a notoriously tough stance, opening interviews with a hostile perspective which aimed at compelling her famous subjects to win her over. For anyone wishing to get to grips with contemporary art, this approach might be similarly effective. Barber has loved art all her life, and her book is particularly effective on the challenges of developing a personal eye, a process seen first through her acquisition of two abstract paintings, which she is touchingly unsure how to hang, and then into her initially adversarial relationship with the contemporary. Barber admits that she failed to see the point of conceptual works, which she found estranging, if not enraging, before encountering Rachel Whiteread’s 1990 ‘Ghost’, a derelict Victorian house cast in plaster. The work catalysed a passion which resulted in Barber serving as a Turner Prize juror in 2006. In between, she couriered salami for a Lucas installation at the Cologne Art Fair, became close friends with Gilbert and George and interviewed the art scene’s most bourgeois duo, the Chapman brothers, who loathed her ‘bourgeois’ opinions so much that they sent her a death threat.
A time when artists were papped falling out of Michelin-starred restaurants and the creator of ‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With’ scandalised the nation by swearing on the telly feels strangely distant. Barber’s book is not nostalgic, yet it evokes the loss of a kind of pre-digital innocence, and of the days when newspapers could afford to put up their writers at the Mondrian in LA. The internet hasn’t yet come for the art market, which is bigger, richer and dirtier than ever before, and it’s interesting to note Barber’s own change of heart on the relationship between artists and celebrity. Recalling an early encounter with Whiteread, who was actively distressed by her level of fame, Barber is bemused and unconvinced; but subsequent conversations with Hockney convince her that unlike the actors and personalities whose portraits formed the bulk of her career, good artists are essentially uninterested in fame. Hockney casts himself as a ‘worker’, a craftsman who has no truck with the mystique of the muse. Grayson Perry, who has, according to Barber, done more to popularise art in Britain than anyone else, is similarly unpretentious, though, as Barber adds dryly: ‘I have no idea whether he has also popularised transvestism.’
Emin is the subject of Barber’s most touching study, through her emergence, as Lucas’s partner in their influential east London collective The Shop, as something of a grande dame in British art. Emin has developed an abrasive reputation not dissimilar to Barber’s own, but here she appears as both courageous and meaningfully philanthropic with her foundation of an art school in Margate. It’s not only a moving account, but one which focuses on female networks and influence within the art world as a whole, a topic which remains relatively neglected beyond the museum.
The Chapman brothers loathed Barber’s ‘bourgeois’ opinions so much that they sent her a death threat
Barber’s tone in general is intrigued and celebratory. She quotes the abstract painter Gillian Ayres’s radical maxim that ‘beauty is very sensible’ (‘beautiful’ being synonymous with ‘despicable’ in artspeak), and admires the stately ‘precariousness’ of Barlow’s large-scale sculptures, yet she is no wide-eyed fangirl. Meeting Dali in Paris in 1969, she was treated to his opinion that sublimating the libido is the key to producing a masterpiece: ‘Zee painters are always zee big masturbators!’ Barber stops short of calling him the obvious, but she does report wearily that she was invited to join a threesome, an occupational hazard of working for Penthouse. Invited to a pre-interview private viewing by Hodgkin’s dealer, she found the ultimate client experience of being left alone with the work in a private sanctum so dull she wished she had brought a book, while a smoky session with Hambling produces a list of London sculptures that deserve to be executed. Glamorous descriptions of partying in palazzi at the Venice Biennale are offset by the admission that gallery dinners are generally dreary.
These touches of sfumato are deliciously pointed, but what makes the book so engaging is Barber’s undimmed enthusiasm for the adventure of looking. ‘I’ve never met an artist who had a hobby,’ she writes admiringly. The book concludes with the recollection of the 2004 fire at the Momart storage facility, which destroyed many infamous YBA works, including the Chapman brothers’ giant swastika diorama ‘Hell’. Unlike those grifting cynics who claimed to be producing ‘scatological aesthetics for the tired of seeing’, Barber loves artists for being artists, for committing their lives to the joy of others’ eyes.
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