Brian Sewell, the Evening Standard’s long-serving art critic, has died aged 84 after a battle with cancer.
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Mr Sewell, who was diagnosed with cancer past year , died at his London home on Saturday morning, his agent Francine Fletcher said.
Tributes from across the art world have been paid to Mr Sewell, whose acerbic wit and sharp tongue won him many admirers – though he was typically feared by some curators.
Doctors discovered a cancerous lump behind his ear in January 2013.
Despite his ailments, Sewell published his first children’s book earlier this year and only stopped working for the Evening Standard in June.
Mr Sewell once called Damien Hirst “f*****g dreadful” and said that Banksy should have been “put down at birth”.
But despite his vast success, Sewell once told the BBC that he had become an art critic “by accident” and viewed himself as a “failure”.
Sewell was born in 1931 in Market Bosworth, Leicestershire, and brought up by his mother, mainly in Kensington, London.
The critic, whose velvet voice and diction were instantly recognisable to many, was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s boys’ school in Hampstead and turned down a place at Oxford University to study at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
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His career started at Christie’s in the 1950s and he counted legendary artists, including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Salvador Dali, among his personal friends. “It was after the Blunt affair – Anthony Blunt and I had achieved a certain unwanted notoriety and Tina Brown, who was just reviving Tatler, wanted an art critic and thought I might be it”, he said.
