It astonishes me how much attention is paid to the art sleaze associated with Jeffrey Epstein. That is in no way meant to diminish the despicability of his sexual predation, but certainly, as regards wealth and sleaze, let’s just say it is to a demonstrable extent how the other half lives.

For my own self and the ambit in which I’ve existed for the past three decades, if I were to say there isn’t a significant sleaze factor in the art world, I’d say stand back, because, in Pinocchio fashion, you’d be impaled by the lance extending that was formerly my nose.

The sleaze factor has always been there. Just now, I am reading Jonathan Richardson’s 1719 advice to Grand Tourists exhorting them to become aware of various pictorial styles, in the certain knowledge that in their drunken debauchery whilst visiting Italy they’d doubtless be sold looks like but surely are not works of art by the most prominent Renaissance masters. The fact is, we are yet today having to sort out what these long dead milordi purchased, gulled into thinking they acquired the real deal when, in fact, they did not.

But art and money are yet a combo that attracts sleaze, as it always has, and the bigger the money, the greater the sleaze, but yet pronounced even at middling levels. With my last blog about the London Art Fair, I was reminded as I visited a couple of weeks ago that, with the painter Keith Vaughan (1912-1977) himself the last couple of years having a significant, albeit posthumous, moment, a fair old number of his pictures seem to have hit the market. And all of them the real deal? Mind, many of them are, but that’s the point, isn’t it? This represents an opportunity for someone to salt the market with pictures by a lesser known but at the moment popular artist. With an oeuvre that runs to a common subject rendered in small scale and with a limited colour palette makes Vaughan an artist whose work is sadly easy to fudge up.

An opportunity, and with no catalogue raisonne, who’s to know? And that much of Vaughan’s work, he being a gay man of the sadly tortured variety, the pictures he’s known for tend to have a homoerotic tinge. But again, here’s a greater chance for sleaze. Where Vaughan’s images were discreet except for those of us within the cognoscenti who had the ability to decode them, now, all of a sudden, the male figures who were formerly sexless in the manner of a Ken doll now sport obvious penises. Anything to make a sale, I guess. Sleazy on a couple of levels, n’est pas?

The fate of the Grand Tourist or modern art buyer sound more like examples of caveat emptor than they do anything approaching the Epstein level, but the fact is, money and sleaze are ineluctably joined. For a number of years, we observed the increasing fortune of one dealer whose financial success exceeded what we could divine of the turnover his own gallery was achieving. Slow in the uptake, it occurred to us that, what was occurring, was the presence of erstwhile partners who, purchasing reasonable quality pieces abroad for cash gained from nefarious activities, and then, sending them duty free to the US for a sale, that, in transit to another national jurisdiction, effectively laundered their dirty money.

Sleazy, absolutely, but accomplished through legal channels as for years, the importation of art and antiques into the US was not dutiable. However, everyone needs a payday, and with the downturn in the retail trade over a decade ago, we expect our unnamed dealer to have an unpleasant visit from his erstwhile partners whose money, still tied up in unsold artwork, remains, shall we say, uncleansed. I will not name anyone’s nationality, fearing being branded an ethnocentrist, but suffice to say, as we imminently expect to find our friend floating in San Francisco Bay, we’ll take a line from popular fiction and say that he will then sleep with the fishes.

This all points to something common to everything dodgy in the trade, a linkage with money, however got, and a pathological fondness for it, whether clean or dirty. And, big surprise, the greater one’s accumulation of money, the fondness for it grows concomitantly. There must be some study somewhere accompanied by graphs that demonstrates this visually. I’d be interested to see it. I doubt however I would be surprised at what it showed. With all of what should be a given, I am therefore further surprised that Epstein’s link with the art world has engendered such outrage. Just a day or so ago, I read in one of the arts commentaries a remark written with magnificent umbrage, suggesting that the Epstein-art world links now emerging ‘…have come to symbolize the endemic depravity of the world’s richest elites.’ Gee, you don’t say, I ask archly. Where have you been for the last 300 years?

What used to be solely for the enjoyment of the holidays is now, for the art dealer, a month’s lull before the beginning of the fairs season. It used to be, in the good old days, that is, less than 2 decades ago, the winter fairs consisted almost solely of just two- the Armoury Show in New York in mid-January, and the Palm Beach fair in late January, basically for New Yorkers who had decamped south for the winter.

Now, the art fair has become a year-round occupation, although precisely serving what objective I have yet to determine. As it was, the fair served a simple function that was easily understood- dealers provided a buying opportunity in venues conveniently located to those who had money to spend. New York in January? Of course- with those money-centre types who for tax purposes postponed receipt of performance budgets from one calendar year until the next, they would naturally be replete with cash in January. Or for those already in the money, enjoying the fruits of their earlier labours whilst lounging in the gentle sun shine of south Florida. They, too, would have advantaged themselves of cash-basis accounting, with gains and profits deferred from December to January. In both cases, and in both venues, money was there and money was spent, and dealers of the best calibre flocked to long established fairs in both locations to, shall we say, reap the harvest.

Or so it was. Now, in a global economy, fairs have proliferated internationally, in particular European fairs that took their names from their original location. Basel and Maastricht are global brands, and are spread far and wide, with no more the established venues where liquidity was traditionally known to puddle.

But many fairs, like many dealers, come and go, with their markets less where the money is, but depend on the cash requirements and marketing blandishments offered by the fair promoters themselves. Actually, ‘blandishments’ is something of an overstatement, as any more, the promoters themselves offer very little but for a venue and advertising- and often very little of that save what can be offered at little cost via social media, or more typically, with inordinate reliance on the better heeled and more tech savvy of their dealer contingent to do their marketing for them.

And, frankly, it is online marketing that is about all dealers have anymore, with so very few of them now occupying bricks and mortar. It is marketing that provides them with the occasional sale, and it is then the fair that provides the only figment of a gallery setting in which to sell what their social media posts tout.

In reading the arts press, one pundit posed the open question about whether the number of arts fairs reflected a growth in the buyer community. Given the flux in the state of the trade, with many more closures marked than openings, I think these changes argue not. In a recent edition of The Art Newspaper, Tim Schneider notes that the highest end of the market is driven by only a handful of collectors. And it is the result of their activity, whether selling, or buying, at Christie’s or Sotheby’s, receives the lion’s share of headline press. The less sexy reporting, if it is is reported at all, about fairs cancellation, gallery closures or consolidations, more accurately tells the tale. Tim Schneider concludes, as the title of his article implies, that the art market is less shrinking than it is ‘right-sizing’, with galleries and fairs adjusting to the economic reality of the marketplace after several years of overexpansion. And why not? At the end of the day, art in whatever form- contemporary or old master- is a commodity, and a fungible one at that, that is responsive to market forces.

Although in a state of flux, art fairs always provide an opportunity for both the seasoned and novice collector. The better fairs provide an excellent opportunity to browse and develop one’s eye. Not to say that everyone will be able to, in one pass, evolve into a connoisseur, but based on the number of objects on offer a body might have the chance to discern the good from the bad.

Certainly at the contemporary fairs in London over the course of the last few years, a number of artists established within the contemporary canon are, shall we say, having a moment. The Bloomsbury Group, Camden Town Group, and the likes of Grant, Fry, Sickert, and more contemporary names like Keith Vaughan and Maurice Cockrill and Terry Frost and Ivon Hitchens are all fairly well represented.

But at the end of the day, any fair’s survival depends on sales- if the dealers don’t achieve sales, they won’t return, and absent dealers, there is no art fair. But I have to say, we find good value at most art fairs, bearing in mind that the dealers themselves are there to sell and in the main, what’s on offer is priced to sell. When in doubt, do a bit of homework, consult the art databases, and then- buy!

See you at the London Art Fair, Islington Business Design Centre, starting 20 January 2026.

https://www.londonartfair.co.uk/

It may be old age sentimentality, but for me, the reopening of the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery was akin to a looked forward to get together with good friends returned after a long journey. In this case, two years since the Sainsbury wing closed with its major reconstruction, much of it accomplished at street level or below, for purposes- quoting now- ‘to enhance visitor experience.’ Lacking access to the wonderful early period pictures hardly enhanced the experience of this visitor, but I must say, now reopened, the expanded entrance lobby with comfortable seating adjacent to a rather nice coffee bar is a real improvement over the dark and pokey space that served no real function other than to provide guidance to the cloakroom. As I think about it, the grand staircase- preserved from the original footprint- is now made even more grand with the correspondingly grand entrance foyer giving the staircase a properly grand sightline.

Mind, in our visit at its private opening last Friday afternoon, Keith and I did enjoy, respectively, a negroni and Aperol spritz in the newly opened Locatelli on the first floor, this was by way of respite after looking at the pictures. My thanks to the event staff of the National Gallery for the manner in which entry was arranged, as it made it wonderfully easy to get a good look- and a post-look drink- without the usual scrum.

Pre-drink, I leisurely took in every picture I particularly wanted to see. This included a very long look at the sumptuous brocade that forms the floor cloth in a mid-trecento painting by Nardo Cione. Its placement beneath the feet of the depicted saints belies the intricacy with which it is worked, the pigments applied over a gold ground with the figurative design then revealed in gold outline, rendered in sgraffito fashion by the artist. That a splendid brocade might be fitting to support the sacred feet of the sainted figures depicted might also have served to advertise the most famous local Florentine product- luxury fabrics.

But also on show was a new and frankly cryptic picture, the gift of the American Friends of the National Gallery. ‘The Virgin and Child with Saints Louis and Margaret’ is a panel painting dateable to the first quarter of the 16th century by an unknown low countries’ master. Apparently part of an English collection perhaps acquired on the grand tour, its early provenance- which might yield at least some stronger affiliation with a national school, or perhaps even an attribution- is sketchy. Its visual iconography is unusual, with the gallery’s own curatorial description going out on a limb, noting ‘…the eccentricity that pervades the panel.’

This eccentricity extends well beyond the grimacing dragon crushed beneath the feet of St Margaret. The infant Christ child holds an unfortunate bird, its beak open in presumed distress given the upside down posture in which it’s held. Clearly a European goldfinch, this bird is sacred as in Christian apocrypha, it is a goldfinch that pulled a thorn from the head of Jesus as he struggled under the weight of the cross on his way to Calvary. The unpleasant treatment of such a sacred animal by the child does, indeed, seem to amplify the eccentric nature of the panel.

Ah, well- as in all things, all this will be revealed in the fulness of time. In the interim, we can look forward to some juicy texts in full, or partial, explication of the picture’s puzzling features.

Despite years of study, I am yet edging up to an acknowledgement of myself as an art historian. Laggard in this as academic study came mid-life, the ‘mid’ now itself almost a lifetime ago. Even now, however, nothing of what I do feels like real work which perhaps explains why I can’t pin myself with a profession. Real work, whether it feels like it or not, included a jaunt to Charleston, near Lewes.

Even in the guise of a good day out, which it was, visiting Charleston, the Sussex home of Bloomsbury Group artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, was yesterday perfectly timed with glorious spring weather and with the gardens that surround the house in full bloom. It left me in little doubt the subject of the floral still life in our collection could have been gathered at will from the garden just outside the studio Grant and Bell shared at the back of the house.

Perhaps some few of my gentle readers know that Keith McCullar and I have long been collectors of the work of Duncan Grant with an interest stirred originally by our proximity to one of his studios kept in what amounted to only a bedsitting room just around the corner from our old home in Islington, north London. This link was vivified by our contact with the scene painter Sebastian Minton, Grant’s near neighbour in Canonbury Square, and Mary Cosh, a local historian who said she was once a figure model for Grant. That of course linked up concurrently and almost mystically with my reading art history at University College London, with the department then sited in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, and partially occupying the former home of Bloomsbury Group notable John Maynard Keynes.

This all sounds made up but I assure you it is not, and the net effect of it was that it brought the work of Grant and Bell to our attention. With all that, had we not, once we became aware of it, actually liked much of their work, particularly that of Grant, the paragraph above would just be a story we might tell over a glass of wine at a gallery opening. By the way, we, or I should say ‘I’, have done so on more occasions than has proved enjoyable for Keith McCullar.  

Charleston has long been a site we had wanted to visit, long delayed with one thing or another, although we’ve been interested in and collecting Grant’s work for over 25 years. The house adjoins a working farm that Bell and Grant never had anything to do with. I am aware that Bell spent quite a bit of time working in the garden, though I suspect, if the exterior were of a piece with the interior of the house, the gardens these days are probably much better kept.

The interior of the house, however, is painted top to toe with fanciful scenes, images and flourishes that are mostly the work of Duncan Grant. The walls themselves are hung with paintings by both Bell and Grant, with imagery, including some sculpture, depicting Bloomsbury Group worthies including Lytton Strachey and Bell’s own sister, Virginia Woolf.

I suspect, however, that the fanciful vivacity of the decoration inside the house has very much to do with Grant’s character, friendly and amorous with a series of gay liaisons that extended up to the end of his very long life.

That Vanessa Bell was more acquiescent than tolerant of Grant’s sex life is the general run of opinion and perhaps it is this that makes very many of Grant’s depictions of Bell of a woman who does not present a happy face to the world, if, in fact, Grant has painted her face at all. Very many pictures show Bell at work in the garden, say, with distance or pose or viewpoint obscuring her face.

One thing that struck Keith and me was how far out in the country Charleston is, some seven miles from the nearest train station in Lewes. During the early years of their occupation, it would have taken some time to get to the farm and in the phrase Keith and I have come to use when describing a location pleasant but otherwise remote from other amenities, when you’re there, you’re there. And Grant wasn’t there all the time, witness the studios- that worked as well as trysting spots- he kept in various places in London, including that in our old neighbourhood in Islington.  

The bright colours and jollity of Grant’s decorations within the Charleston farmhouse dissemble what was not always a happy house. With the interior in particular kept as it was at the time of Grant’s death in 1978, it is nearly a shrine, but with the house and its pictures and decorations hardly inert, they show the effect of years and perhaps it is this that compounds the spiritually mournful feel of the place. The gardens, of course, can be renewed, as they clearly are, with ministrations currently in the charge of a talented gardener. The inside of the house cannot be kept in the same way.  

Mind you, I am glad I went and no question, it did provide some insight into the lives and consequent productions of its two most famous residents. And, in reflection, perhaps it is my own discipline that makes a methodology of building context to add a sight of meaning to that production. And, too, contextual theory can only go so far- Bell and Grant are long dead and it is impossible to measure how much of their spirit remains about the place. Even so, and even on a brilliantly sunny day, there is more than a hint of melancholy that lingers about the place. 

Charleston, Firle, near Lewes, East Sussex

October is Gay Pride Month in Hawaii. Rather than just enjoy the festivities and overdose on aloha- and mai tais- a bit of literary sobriety might be in order. A few thoughts, therefore, penned a few years ago, but worth repeating, and remembering.

On the drive home from the gym this morning, I was caught up short by the squib on NPR about LGBT pride month, marking as it does 50 years since the Stonewall riots. As it happens, it is also 39 years this month since Keith McCullar and I plighted our troth, and the confluence of the two events bears some more than modest consideration- primarily for myself, but briefly told for benefit of my gentle readers who might find these musings of interest, too.

In June of 1969 I was 15 years old, and in benighted central California had no knowledge of anything about the Stonewall riots. Indeed, The Fresno Bee, our local newspaper and source of most information, was absent about what was probably considered in New York at the time a minor incident. Let me tell you, though, I was sufficiently self-aware to know I was gay as pink ink, not out, but certainly aware of what I was about, so Stonewall anything that was printed in our local rag would not just have caught my attention but seared itself in my memory. All this by way of saying, at the time, there was little or no coverage beyond what little there was in far, far away New York.

It is astonishing to consider, though, how just a few years post Stonewall, there was the florescence of gay liberation that also enveloped me, but I must say, with the assassination of Harvey Milk in 1978, I wondered if we had seen the highwater mark, and that the backlash his killing seemed to represent might betoken a return to repression. It didn’t happen, and I was fortunate enough in 1979 to attend the memorial 50th birthday party for Milk hosted in San Francisco by the Alice B Toklas Democratic Club, with Jane Fonda as the featured speaker. It was a wonderfully celebratory evening and as I think about it, something of a relief that, with so many local and state officials in attendance, everything appeared to be proceeding apace.

As they were for me, too. Not all that long after, Keith and I met- in benighted Fresno of all places, gold being where you find it- and the rest is generally pleasant sometimes blissful occasionally fraught history. But what I mean to say in this paragraph is that, with all the opportunities for dating, for tricks, for social outlets, and for lovers- everything that was on offer for a gay man in his 20’s- it seemed to me then that there could be nothing more gay than there then was. Hedonistically shallow as this sounds, yet aware that Stonewall was the watershed I was without apology having a great time.

What was yet to come was the tragedy of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. After a certain point, I became numb to the suffering of so many of my friends. Indeed, Keith and I now have very few gay acquaintances of our own age, as very nearly all of them died in the 80’s and early 90’s before drug therapies developed to stem the tide. Not entirely numb, as I become sad as I write this, thinking of those friends with whom I looked forward to growing old. Shared experience is a cornerstone of friendship, and for those friends with whom one came out, there can be no substitute. Early on, it seemed that what Dan White couldn’t do with the assassination of Harvey Milk, HIV could do, and we braced for ostracism at the very least, if not broadscale exclusion, as the mysteries surrounding the disease frightened everyone. ‘Frightened’? What understatement- I should more accurately say ‘drove everyone straight or gay to the panicked fringes of rational thought and beyond.’ I will never forget receiving a letter from someone very close to me, asking Keith and me to avoid playing with her small children, as we might infect them.

Neither Keith nor I from the beginning hid the nature of our relationship, and if it made any kind of difference even in our work lives, we were at the time so focused on our careers, and of course the lives we were making with each other, we were not aware. What I did see, though, was in the late 80’s and early ‘90’s a gradual, more than a tolerance but less than an acceptance of gay men in the straight community. Perhaps it might better be said as an easing of tension. It occurred to me the why of this, as so many gay men having moved away post Stonewall to live in the big cities, they then came back home when desperately ill and absent all else sought family to provide care for them. The tragedy of HIV/AIDS brought gayness literally inside the homes of very many Americans. That there was a paucity of national recognition of the crisis is probably best characterized by President Reagan’s laggard acknowledgement, but the fact is, those who lost their lives were martyrs to the emergence of a broadscale realization that gayness was a human phenomenon, common to all populations- white and people of color, rich and poor, urban and rural. And liberal and conservative. The Bible thumping fundamentalist had to, and did, have a rethink about the nature of love and Christian commitment when their gay son returned to his childhood bedroom to die.

And all the eventual good for surviving and newly out gay men wrought of this tragedy proceeds, well not apace, but forward. We’re married Keith and I, file our tax returns jointly, and if one or the other of us pops his clogs, will be eligible for Social Security survivors’ benefits. What I thought 40 years ago of an environment about as gay as one could get was substantially less than, and it is with my own advancing age and experience that I’ve come to realize what in fact we lacked, and what the human cost has been in trying to achieve what we have a right to. A bit of a sidebar, and you can call me a recidivist, but the moves forward in this country have had some effects that, to my mind, are wistfully bittersweet. The gay ghettoes in the larger American cities are dwindling, as those who formed them finding safety and comfortability in numbers now find they don’t require what they formerly found in places like The Castro in San Francisco or Boys Town in West Hollywood or Greenwich Village. And I do miss the plethora of gay bars, with one or more even in small communities, always fun to hang out, in the manner of a private club. Mind you, very many of those private clubs were about as pleasant aesthetically as a public restroom, but perhaps for the sake of nostalgia, Keith and I yet make some effort to visit gay bars whenever we travel.

It may be my style of writing, or my way of thinking, but the sort of linear narrative I’ve communicated about the progress of gay liberation shouldn’t even in this brief squib detract from what it is that concerns me now, that is, how much further we have to go. I am reminded of this frequently, with continued back of the bus treatment from people who would deny to their last breath they’re any way homophobic. For those who know us, gay or straight, close friends to casual acquaintances, Keith and I probably wouldn’t be identified as anything other than bright, ambitious and hardworking. Nothing unusual in that, but faced with us in a business setting, we’ve both of us often been dismissed and shunted aside in ways and by people that seemed otherwise friendly disposed to us. Finally, after years of this treatment- not constant, but frequent enough to become notable- it occurred to me that to this day the straight world has an enduring notion certainly of gay men that’s concretely fixed. Keith and I should and must be limp-wristed sissies, addle brained and more interested in flower arranging than debt swaps or real property syndications or inventory turn days. And these same homophobe deny-ers will fight to maintain those opinions and fight to relegate us to a role that they think, actually, no, that they know is appropriate for gay men. The older Keith and I get, the more combative we become, and we’re given to confront this phenomenon more and more, and in an in-your-face manner.

Well, we’re up to it. In fact, I find myself, where in former times I would just not hide my gayness or the fact of my relationship with Keith, now make a point of communicating all this immediately, becoming, as it were, a solo swat team for gay socialization.

Pride Month has gone, and LGBTQ+ has broadened gay liberation beyond anything anyone could have imagined in 1969. While at times I wish for a return to the fun of those very brief halcyon years just post Stonewall and just pre-HIV but am now old enough to realize that with fun and good times comes complacence, and that complacence beckons a return to repression. We are then, Keith and me, as we look forward to our fifth decade together mindful of the past and unwilling to allow a creeping social conservatism to disintegrate what we’ve at last achieved. Again, I’ll correct myself, as ‘at last’ implies we’re at the top of the mountain in terms of legal and social equality. Closer to the top, perhaps, but further to go to crest the hill. In our home, we’ll always be mindful of Stonewall and its effects and fight for a brighter future. But to repeat what I wrote just a moment ago, we’re up to it.