Jack Vettriano: ‘His paintings are like a double cheeseburger in a greasy wrapper’

This article is more than 8 months old

The Scot painted singing butlers, ‘broads’ in bras and tough guys in suits, in works critics found lurid, chintzy, devoid of irony and often sexist. But they were also hugely popular – showing the power of ‘I get it’ art

Eddie Frankel

In 1992, Jack Vettriano’s painting The Singing Butler was rejected by the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Anyone who has seen some of the dross picked for display in the RA’s annual open submission collision of amateur artists and big stars in recent decades will be thinking: “Ouch, must’ve been a real dud.” But The Singing Butler not only wasn’t a dud, it went on to become one of the most ubiquitous and – whisper it – iconic British paintings since the second world war.

 

Self-Portrait, 1932
Duncan Grant

The Secret Erotic Drawings of Duncan Grant

For decades, the Bloomsbury-group artist quietly sketched his male lovers. These works, long kept hidden by the friends who inherited them, are finally going on display.

Anna Russell
October 10, 2022

Erotic art by Duncan Grant is on display at Charleston, in East Sussex.Art work by Duncan Grant / Courtesy The Charleston Trust © The Estate of Duncan Grant

What happens in an artist’s private life? In public, Duncan Grant was a charismatic and influential painter, a member of the Bloomsbury group of artists and intellectuals who flourished in London during and after the World Wars. In private, he was equally charismatic, and involved with a series of male lovers—erotic dalliances that he kept hidden to avoid criminal prosecution. Born in 1885, when Queen Victoria still ruled, Grant was a hearty octogenarian when private acts of homosexuality were largely decriminalized in England, in 1967. By then, he was a man of considerable experience, adept at picking up men at the National Gallery and Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner. For decades, Grant, a compulsive sketcher, kept hundreds of explicit drawings—scribbled on the backs of paper scraps and grocery lists—out of the public eye. Playful and inventive, they were fuelled by memories of his trysts and his freewheeling imagination. “I can’t speak for anyone else,” he said, in 1970, “but I had relations with anyone who would have me.”

 

Subversive sexuality amid the smell of cow dung – Duncan Grant: 1920 review

Charleston, East Sussex
This exhibition at the Bloomsbury group artist’s mural-filled former home joyously recreates his intensely sexual first solo show

Jonathan Jones
Wednesday 15 September 2021

The tale of Venus and Adonis has been used in various sexually ambiguous ways for centuries. Shakespeare adopts the voice of the goddess in his long poem Venus and Adonis: she pleads with her lover – or is it the Bard’s? – not to leave, not to go on the boar hunt in which he’s doomed to die. Its lyricism is echoed in Cy Twombly’s paintings, in which Adonis was his former lover Robert Rauschenberg. For the pioneering British modernist Duncan Grant, in a joyous exhibition at his mural-covered, biography-stained home in the East Sussex hills, the metamorphosing body of Venus allows a shift of identity. This is not a woman but a constructed abstract form with which the artist can merge, to express his own longing for Adonis.