The Economist praises Martin Gayford’s work on Constable with a reminder that Constable was a creature of his times waiting patiently for the opportunity to get on with his life:

Such was the fate of Constable—handsome, possessed of a mind, as he said, “of the most excruciating sensibility”—and pretty Maria Bicknell, who waited seven years before they could marry in 1816. Her father was a London solicitor; his a prosperous corn merchant in the Suffolk village of East Bergholt, where Maria’s rich grandfather was rector. All of them took a dim view of painting as a profession.

Constable found little encouragement from his fellows either. Landscape painting ranked low in the hierarchy of genres, especially Constable’s kind: fields, mills, towpaths—mere “map-work”, scoffed J.H. Fuseli, professor at the Royal Academy. Besides, many thought Constable’s execution crude. His loose, free brushwork impressed the French, notably Eugène Delacroix, but the English wanted more finish. Maria, who bore him seven children, died of tuberculosis before he was elected to the Royal Academy in 1829.

Finding Nothing Ugly (Economist)

Constable in Love (Amazon.co.uk)

Newsweek introduces us to a novel in the form of an auction catalogue:

Lenore Doolan met Harold Morris at a Halloween party in 2002. She was dressed as Lizzie Borden in a bloodstained lace blouse, he as Harry Houdini in an evening shirt and handcuffs. They were together for four years. Recently, the detritus of their relationship was sold to the highest bidder by the auction house of Strachan & Quinn. Lots included pictures from the night they met, Scrabble tiles Lenore sent Harold that spelled out THANK YOU, the salt-and-pepper shakers they stole from restaurants and the corks they saved from special bottles of wine. Sorry you missed the auction? Don’t be. Strachan & Quinn doesn’t really exist. Nor, for that matter, do Lenore and Harold. They are the creation of Leanne Shapton, the writer and artist who created “Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry.” The book looks exactly like an auction catalog, with photographs and brief yet detailed descriptions of the 332 lots for sale. Think of it as a love story told by a curator, instead of a narrator.

Love on the Blocks (Newsweek)

Something’s happening with Victorian art lately. The mawkish style seems to be gaining visibility, favor and traction in the art market. The 242-lot David Scott collection sold for £4.6m in November. Now Jeremy Paxman is launching a four-part series on the BBC exploring the Victorian era through its art:

New series in which Jeremy Paxman takes his love of Victorian paintings as the starting point for a journey into Victorian Britain. Such pictures may not be fashionable today, but they are a gold mine of information about the most dynamic age in British history.

Waldemar Jaszczak is less convinced. After wondering aloud whether its appropriate to have a political journalist exploring art in a TV series and print, he makes this point:

Paxman’s second driving idea – that Victorian painting is the television of its times – is even more misleading. If Victorian painting is the television of its times, then it is the television drivel of its times: Big Brother, not Dennis Potter; Britain’s Got Talent, not a Howard Brenton play. An experienced cynic such as Paxman ought to have been able to spot the exploitative motivation behind the three-handkerchief poverty porn that made rich men of Sir Luke Fildes or Sir Hubert von Herkomer. Paxman himself has complained noisily about the trivialisation of television, yet here he is promoting sugary Victorian visions of childhood and trotting happily through the history of fairy painting without acknowledging the simple truth that a lousy painting is as worthless as a lousy soap opera.

The Victorians: Painting the Town (BBC)

The Victorians: Britain Through the Paintings of the Age by Jeremy Paxman (Times Online)

Waldemar Januszczak offers this brilliant analysis of the YBA through a review of a fragment history of the movement that is “as full of omissions as it is admissions:”

The YBAs were so uncouth and slobbish that most self-respecting art commentators have been nervous of associating themselves with their antics. Gregor Muir gleefully remembers seeing Emin crawling on all fours through the Cologne art fair before finally finding a “corporate water feature” to vomit into. And Hirst’s favourite “penis prank” was to pull a bit of his testicles through a small hole in his trousers and ask passing women to help him remove the chewing gum that was stuck to him. Back in Cologne, Muir and Jake Chapman drank themselves into such an excitable state that they broke into the art fair at night and swapped around all the paintings before passing out in a shop window in full view of the passing Germans. Raphaelesque behaviour, it wasn’t. [ . . . ]

But the chief reason, I suspect, why this brilliant and full-blooded assault on the art system (the most exhilarating art development of my lifetime) has been so roundly ignored by the encapsulators is that the witnesses who were there and who might have had something insightful to say about what was happening have forgotten most of the details. They were too drunk, too coked up, too busy scrounging up some rent, too out of work and squalor-happy to remember much about the glory days. [ . . . ]

Where all this becomes pertinent rather than self-pitying is in colouring in the grim social landscape from which the YBAs emerged. The class angers that triggered this emergence have never been properly understood for the simple reason that most art commentators come from somewhere very different. The divide between the Tate crowd and this crowd was positively Dickensian. Hirst, from Leeds, was the son of a single Irish mum and an unknown itinerant father. Emin’s dad was a Turkish Cypriot, and the neighbours in Margate regularly abused her mother as a “darkie-lover”. Sarah Lucas grew up in the Holloway Road and was a classic north London layabout with a huge mouth and a tiny education.

No cast list as dysfunctional as this had ever been ushered onto the stage of British art before. Nor was anyone actually ushering them onto the stage this time. The entire YBA phenomenon is presented here as an outrageous display of gate-crashing. Finding their own spaces, putting on their own shows, cobbling together home-made art from whatever was at hand in the local skip, making their own posters, deciding on their own subject matter, blagging their way into derelict properties, hunting down the free beer, the great unwashed had found a smuggler’s route into the art world. [ . . . ]

But for all the profound impecuniousness remembered here so shakily, the final picture that emerges is a heartening one: an enclosed society of like-minded pals, working, sleeping, drinking together, decides to force a new working-class aesthetic onto the art world. And somehow manages it.

Lucky Kunst: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art by Gregor Muir (Times of London)

The Los Angeles Times looks at local alternative artist Spencer Fairey’s new-found fame and its consequences while reviewing a new book collecting 20 years of his work, Supply and Demand:

Fairey’s been around for a long time, but he’s always operated below the mainstream radar; his work has adorned album covers and alternative weeklies, and it has been plastered on walls and billboards all over L.A. With the Obama portrait, however, he has moved into the center of the culture, providing a graphic as instantly recognizable as the president-elect himself. What happens when an underground artist suddenly comes to occupy such a position? Fairey is about to find out.

“Supply and Demand: The Art of Shepard Fairey” (Los Angeles Times)

Jed Perl is one of those alternatingly sublime and annoying writers. And this Barnes and Noble video displays that in equal parts. But it also makes his book on Watteau enticing. Watch and decide for yourself.