Read The Times obituary

Looking back, I realise that John Russell had a formative and wholly beneficial influence on my growing involvement with art. In 1960, when I was thirteen years old, I wandered into the Wallace Collection and had an unforgettable epiphany. The paintings there by Rubens, Poussin, Velazquez and above all Rembrandt overwhelmed me. From then on, looking at art became my obsession, and every weekend John’s art column in The Sunday Times enriched my mind.

Trapped at a boarding school in Bath, I envied John his ability to roam around London, Paris, Venice and the rest of Europe visiting the best exhibitions on offer. His life struck me as idyllic, and the fact that he also wrote books and curated exhibitions sharply increased my admiration. John’s inspiring example made me realise that art critics need not confine themselves to penning a weekly review. They can also write at length, and in depth, about the art that matters most to them. John, a famously and enviably swift writer, became a prolific author. He also curated a succession of impressive exhibitions, surveying the achievements of Modigliani in 1964, Rouault in 1966 and Balthus in 1968.

Reading his regular criticism, I warmed to a writer whose reviews were always informed by a discerning awareness of history. But I particularly liked John’s growing engagement with the art of his own time. During the 1960s he was quick to champion young artists at the time of their emergence. Painters and sculptors as outstanding as David Hockney, Ron Kitaj, Howard Hodgkin and Anthony Caro all benefited from his enthusiastic response at crucial points in their careers. Hungry for adventurous new art myself, I was fascinated by John’s reviews of these and other artists in the 1960s.

At a time when so many British gallery-goers still waxed vehement in their scornful dismissal of innovative art, John stood out as an enlightened exception. He realised, increasingly, that the 1960s was an extraordinary period for contemporary art in Britain. And he refused to court popularity with his more philistine readers by dismissing the boldest experimenters out of hand. Far from sneering and playing for easy laughs by condemning the most audacious young artists, he preferred to advance understanding and discover how they were enlarging the language of art.

In other words, John provided a tonic and played an important part in countering the knee-jerk hatred of modernism which had poisoned British culture for so long. At a time when plenty of people were ready to sneer at Warhol or Lichtenstein, he organised with Suzi Gablik a defiantly celebratory survey of Pop Art at the Hayward Gallery. And he was no less willing to stand against the antagonism so often aimed at Francis Bacon. When I first met Bacon in 1971, he made clear that he expected nothing but hostility from his fellow-countrymen. Without any self-pity, Bacon told me he had recently looked through “all the reviews I’ve had from my Marlborough shows over the years”, and “all of them, virtually without exception, were bad.” But in that very same year, 1971, John published a book on Bacon which provided a far more positive and insightful analysis.

Bacon’s work brought out the most dynamic, supple and visceral side of John’s critical writing. Just listen to this passage, where he closes with relish on the essence of Bacon’s restless and tormented vision: “Bacon wrenched, reversed, abbreviated, jellified and generally reinvented the human image. The paint-structure was by turns brusque and sumptuous, lyrical and offhand, pulpy and marmoreal. Swerving, pouncing, colliding with itself, taking for granted the most bizarre conjunctions of impulse, it produced a multiple imagery which was quite new in painting.”

I admired John’s open-mindedness, and respected his willingness to fight British philistinism with vigour. Even after he moved to New York, John was more than ready to weigh in on the side of audacious art. When the so-called bricks rumpus exploded on this side of the Atlantic in 1976, tabloid newspapers crowed over the Tate’s acquisition of Carl Andre’s sculpture. The Daily Mirror plastered its front page with the headline “What A Load Of Rubbish”, but John sent a fiercely supportive letter commending the Tate’s willingness to purchase the bricks.

When I started out at as a critic myself, on the Evening Standard, plenty of reactionaries dismissed my championship of conceptual developments. In 1973, when I curated a show of young artists like Richard Long, older critics deplored the exhibition. But John saluted my efforts by referring to D.H.Lawrence, who once declared that he would like his writing to make people “alter, and have more sense.” John claimed that Lawrence had defined “the eventual aim of all art that is worth talking about.” But I believe that Lawrence’s words could equally well be applied to John’s own work. He succeeded, through his energetic, incisive, eloquent and impassioned writings, in making us “alter, and have more sense.” I am delighted to pay tribute to John’s immense and indispensable achievement.

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