The grit in the oyster

Richard Dorment doesn’t do whimsy. Or Stanley Spencer. He’s a fan of Cy Twombly and Brice Marden, Gilbert and George and Mark Wallinger, Rachel Whiteread and Susan Hiller. He loves writing about contemporary art. And he worked as art critic of the Daily Telegraph for 25 years. Like the grit in the oyster he irritated the establishment, producing pearl after pearl that occasionally had even his own paper distancing itself from his opinions. ‘I looked edgy and transgressive,’ he says, ‘when in reality my taste in art was fairly cautious.’

Born in America, Dorment studied art history at Princeton and was assistant curator in European painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art before moving to London and working as an exhibition organiser and writer on art. Having railed against the poor standard of art criticism in the British press, he joined the Telegraph in 1986, in good time to take a position in the furore that erupted over developments in contemporary British art through the late Eighties and Nineties, the years of Britart, the Turner Prize and the Saatchi Gallery.

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Public opinion raged against these explorations of the boundaries and meaning of art, egged on by commentators who tossed all innovative art into one bag and dumped it as rubbish. By contrast, Dorment, and perhaps it should be stressed that he was not alone in this, engaged with what these individual artists, collectors and curators were doing and wrote about it in the same clear, intelligent prose with which he reviewed all the exhibitions he visited, from Ice Age Art to Fairy Paintings, from Caravaggio, Picasso and Pollock to Eygptian tomb paintings, video installations and performance art.

The selection of reviews in Exhibitionist, according to Dorment, includes those that make him look good, that read well and that say something new about the subject.