Sir Alfred Munnings

I see the site is having one of its fun days, duplicating posts!  I agree with you all, and disagreed with my landlady - she couldn't get over his "bigoted" views; and he was President of the Royal Academy at the time (succeeded shortly after this demonstration by Sir Gerald Kelly, a far more tolerant man who defused the controversy over Spencer, and stopped him from being charged).  Munnings could paint - and indeed sculpt, which he learned just by doing it; but you perhaps did need to be besotted by horses to fully appreciate him - and while there has been the occasional horse with whom I've got on very well, I don't find them especially interesting as subjects - other than in the challenge they pose to anyone attempting to draw and paint them.   Munnings would not be the only outwardly coarse, loud, opinionated, and occasionally sozzled man - he was drunk when he made one of his comments on Picasso, captured on air - to have a deeply sensitive, gentler side tucked away, revealed by his actual work.  He would have been a gift to radical students of his day - a wonderful hate figure for them, almost fashioned to their purpose.  As always - nuance gets lost when extreme views are being exchanged: something else that isn't exactly new - and remains true today.

I do wish he'd moved on beyond horses!  But he was clearly a fine figure painter - it's really quite a pity that we know so much about him; keep it quiet!  Trouble is, the intake of booze does tend to let it all out. Plainly, he wasn't always well-oiled: some of his paintings are beautifully observed; but I can't get beyond that television broadcast of so many years ago, when, in praising Churchill, he did rather slurp out his alcoholically enabled prejudices.  And yet - I know of a very highly admired US painter (admired not least by me) who believes that Picasso sent the art world on a wholly wrong path; and I CAN see the sense of that, since Picasso did break a mould and sent us off along a very different route.  The idea/theory isn't exactly wrong, just not generally accepted.   Munnings was not wrong - in my opinion - he just had a different perception.   Does it matter that he drank like a thirsty fish?  Well, no - provided he wasn't sluicing the stuff back by the litre when he expressed his opinions.