Overheard at Helly Nahmad: “A Paintbrush Isn’t Just a Paintbrush”

LONDON—On Tuesday, a day before the Frieze fair was to throw open its doors to VIP collectors, a small group of well-heeled art worlders gathered in Helly Nahmad’s well-appointed gallery on Cork Street to sip champagne, nibble on canapes, and view “L’Artiste, Le Modele, et La Peinture,” an exhibition of late paintings by Picasso, and to hear its curator Matthew Collings give a talk on the show. Collings, however, who is best known for his book Blimey! on the YBA phenomenon, his art-history-for-the-masses television series, and his lively monthly column in our sister publication Modern Painters, and who co-curated the Picasso show with his wife, fellow painter Emma Biggs, was a no-show. Pinch-hitting for him was Guardian art critic Adrian Searle, who quickly revealed to his audience that he was once a painter and shared a studio with Collings. “Have you ever seen that movie Lust for Life, where Gauguin and Van Gogh share a studio, and Gauguin says, 'You paint too fast!' and Van Gogh says, 'You look too fast!'—It was like that.”

Speaking of lust—that’s pretty much what Searle did. Having dispensed with some art historical basics—how Picasso competed with great painters of the past like Manet by redoing their masterpieces—the critic got down to business. Pointing to a depiction of a painter and his model, Searle drew the audience’s attention to all the brush shapes, and, evoking Freud, announced, “A paintbrush isn’t just a paintbrush in an artist’s hand, it’s also his prick. The artist and his brush,” he mused. “There’s an essay in there somewhere.” And yet that wasn’t the raciest moment in the talk. That came earlier, when Royal Academy exhibitions secretary Norman Rosenthal pointed out how hot a commodity late Picassos are on the market. (After all, these Collings-arranged paintings were first displayed at Nahmad’s booth at the Basel art fair in June.) After Searle mentioned how important it is for exhibitions to bring the painter’s late work to light, Rosenthal chimed in, “And make lots of money!”