Bevis Hillier

… the bad, and the ugly

issue 20 October 2012

At Oxford in 1960, I had history tutorials from Alan Bennett. Just before he shot to stardom in the revue Beyond the Fringe, he was writing a thesis on the retinue of
Richard II. Another of his pupils was David Bindman, later a professor of art history at London University. I was collecting pottery and Bindman already had an impressive collection of drawings.

In his book Untold Stories (2005), Bennett wrote:

David Bindman would show me Old Master drawings he had picked up for a song, and Bevis Hillier would fetch along ceramics. I knew little of either and could neither confirm nor deny the confident attributions both boys put forward. But they taught me a more useful lesson than I ever taught them, namely that my own taste was for surfaces.

Stephen Bayley says much the same thing, in different words, in his intriguing, clever, curious, maddening book:

For as long as I can remember, I have been helplessly engrossed with the look of things. It may be attributed to a crude infatuation with superficialities and effects.

Absolutely addicted to rhetorical questions (not all of them answered) he begins the book with one:

The construct of beauty versus ugliness is one of the most perplexing in our imaginations. Is there actually such a thing as ugliness? It’s a commonplace to assume the answer is yes.

‘Ugly’ is a politically incorrect word. If we think a man ugly, we may call him ‘not conventionally handsome’. In England, an ill-favoured woman is ‘plain’; the French give her a nice exemption clause in the expression ‘jolie laide’. I think Bayley has chosen Ugly as the title of his book for its provocativeness, its shock value. His core subject is really taste; and maybe a reason for avoiding that word in the title is that ‘taste’ suggests coteries of supercilious cognoscenti looking down on things.

GIF Image

Disagree with half of it, enjoy reading all of it

TRY 3 MONTHS FOR $5
Our magazine articles are for subscribers only. Start your 3-month trial today for just $5 and subscribe to more than one view

Comments

Join the debate for just £1 a month

Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.

Already a subscriber? Log in