A Spectator Christmas poll: Who is the most overrated painter?

Jonathan Meades      

This is a crowded field. A few years ago, I was delighted when Tracey Emin walked out of an address I was giving at the Royal Academy. But she’s no painter. The crown, then, has to go to Lucian Freud who was, unquestionably, a painter but a really bad one. Early on in his career were a few works which owed their being to the neue sachlichkeit (although he denied it). Soon however the primacy of ‘the mark’ asserted itself – splodgy, messy, coarse, smeared, oafish, impasted and increasingly auto-plagiaristic. It’s all very well attempting to reduce your models and daughters (often the same) to bulky chunks from an abattoir, but it would help were the self-promoting genius to study butchery first. And it’s not just the carnage that he got wrong. Robin Simon wondered: ‘Are all those uphill floorboards really successful, or are they distractingly bad?’

Slavoj Zizek   

There is no doubt about this: the most overrated painter is the one at the very top, none other than Leonardo da Vinci himself. Raffaello Santi (with his Mozartean elegance) and Michelangelo (with his Beethoven-like painful creative effort) are much superior to Leonardo, who is ultimately just a good craftsman. Yes, he knew and could do a lot of things, but his paintings are just one of the domains of his work, on a par with his construction of water channels and military devices. So what about the mystery of Mona Lisa’s smile? I think it is a fake mystery – there is no secret behind her smile. Its best explanation is provided by Slovene (my own) language – every (honest) Slovene knows what the smile of Mona Lisa is about. Slovenes do not have their own dirty words, they have to borrow them, mostly from Serbian and Croatian, but also from Italian.