Once a fashionable monster

Maurice Yacowar, Emeritus Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Calgary, begins his ‘portrait’ thus: ‘John Bratby was an overachiever who fell short of his potential.’ Rather like this book really. Instead of a balanced assessment of one of the most interesting postwar figures in the British art world, we are offered a lurid account of Bratby’s private life and loves in the sort of shameless exposé of which their hero would quite possibly have approved. But it’s a very different thing for an artist to leak his own scandal to the papers in order to boost sales from a foreign academic’s coming along and reheating it all. This book simply promotes the Bratby myth without attempting to explain it. Odd moments of perception aside, it’s an essentially voyeuristic enterprise that many will find overwhelmingly depressing.