The critics say it's bad art. But does it matter what they say? Legendary Scottish-Italian artist Jack Vettriano died this week aged 73. Beloved by the public, loathed by the critics, we try to thread the needle and reflect on what it is about his divisive paintings that always inspired us.
An elegant couple waltz on the beach while umbrella-wielding maid and singing butler struggle to shelter them from wind and rain. A femme fatale clad in scanty black lingerie lounges on a lush, love-stained couch, awaiting that first, breathless, sensual connection. A painter in shirt sleeves and waistcoat sits on the edge of his bed, heavy, exhausted, blank.
The figures are stiff, lifeless, caught in a trance. This might be a problem of the painter's technique but perhaps it is a sign of something else, a pointer towards thematic concerns below surface appearances. The public has always seen something different in Vettriano's work. Something deeper. Their affectless expressions and empty gestures may be very carefully and calculatedly captured.
Jack Vettriano has died, and with him goes one of the most fascinating contradictions in modern art. For some reason, we have always loved Vettriano when he has been the artist many loved to hate. The critics never respected him. They dismissed his work as cheap trash, the painterly equivalent of pulp fiction, unimaginative, a mere aesthetic commodity for the masses.
Art critic Duncan MacMillan famously argued that Vettriano's paintings were "meant to be about sex but weren’t actually about sex at all." Figures in his paintings barely touch, the supposed eroticism is clinical, disconnected. To the art establishment, Vettriano’s work lacks depth, irony, or conceptual weight. And yet, millions love his paintings. His prints outsell those of the greats, like Dali and Van Gogh. Simple economics don’t justify artistic greatness but clearly there is something there, something people recognise and are drawn to. Something we, too, have always been drawn to.
That something, for us, is boredom. Boredom born of too much desire. Boredom induced by passion fatigue.
It isn’t the boredom of looking at dull painting, but the boredom within the paintings themselves that strikes us. A deep, humming ennui that saturates every staged moment, every stiff embrace, every gloved hand that hovers near but never quite touches a padded shoulder.
Vettriano’s paintings are not about sex, it's true. They about the rituals surrounding sex, and how those rituals can disconnect us from the act itself. The mechanical, repetitive attempts to summon passion, to recreate something felt before but now elusive. They are about the lingering disappointment that follows desire, the way erotic energy can burn out and leave only the ashes of routine.
Critics have always taken Vettriano’s paintings at face value, and perhaps Vettriano did too. They saw the sharply dressed men, the stockings, the silhouetted dancers, and concluded they were nothing more than shallow fantasies. But it is our right, as the viewer, to see something else. To see what we want to see. Fantasies, especially repetitive ones, are revealing. When we look at Vettriano’s paintings, what we see is not erotic fulfilment but the desperate attempt to keep a performance alive. You see sex as a desperate act of theatre, with lovers going through the motions, donning their roles, hoping to recapture a spark that may have been real once but has long since flickered out.
There’s an argument to be made that all sex is ritual. It is built on gesture, sequence, expectation, delayed gratification. From the classic dinner date to the well-worn dynamics of dominance and submission, there is a structure we follow in order to generate desire. But what happens when the structure becomes too familiar? When the gestures no longer spark excitement but are repeated out of habit, out of the hope that this time, something will reignite? The mind is willing but the flesh wilts and withers. Tumescence always abandons you at the worst possible moment. This is the space Vettriano’s paintings explore.
Take The Singing Butler, perhaps his most famous work. A couple dances on the beach, elegantly dressed, servants holding umbrellas against the wind. It is romantic, yes, but there is something unreal about it. The positioning is stiff, the figures disconnected, the whole scene staged. Everybody dreams of dancing on the beach with their lover. And yet there is no abandon here. No freedom. The passion that should animate it feels oddly absent. It is a painting about the performance of romance rather than romance itself.
This feeling runs through his entire body of work. The men in his paintings, with their ever-present suits and cigarettes, play the role of the brooding seducer. The women, draped in lingerie or evening gowns, pose in ways designed to entice. It is a misogynistic universe of exhausted transaction. And yet, there is an uncanny detachment. It is as if they are not seducing each other, but performing seduction for some unseen audience. There is desire, but it is hollow. The promise is there, but never quite fulfilled.
This is why MacMillan’s critique, that Vettriano’s paintings were meant to be sexy but weren’t, may miss the point. The lack of touch, of a genuine sensuality isn’t a failure. It’s the entire theme. The figures in these paintings are chasing something that remains out of reach, just as we do in real life. It’s a particular kind of boredom, not the boredom of having nothing to do, but the boredom that comes from repetition, from attempting to relive an experience that once thrilled but has become mechanical.
Vettriano himself seemed to acknowledge this, whether consciously or not. He described his paintings as being about "the ritual of courtship." And what is ritual but an attempt to recreate something sacred, even when the magic is gone? Think of churchgoers who attend service every Sunday, kneeling, crossing themselves, reciting the same prayers, not necessarily because they feel a divine presence each time, but because they once did, and they hope to again. Ritual is how we try to keep meaning alive. And sex, at its most ritualistic, is the same.
Vettriano’s paintings are full of such rituals: the act of lighting a cigarette, the adjusting of a tie, the way a woman leans against a bar waiting for someone to notice her or leans against her sports car waiting for the lover who will never show up. Cliché after gendered cliché. Yet these are gestures loaded with fascination, repeated endlessly. They are a sad, demonic equivalent of the sign of the cross, a motion once powerful, now a mere echo of past experiences.
This is perhaps why his paintings resonate so deeply with so many people, despite the art world’s dismissal. They capture something true about desire: the way it is pursued, the way it fades, the way we try to resurrect it through habit and spectacle. They depict longing, but not fulfilment. Passion, but not connection. In the end, they are less about sex itself and more about the longing for something just out of reach. The fantasy that, next time, the feeling will be real again.
Vettriano has died but his work lives on. Maybe it is trash, but who cares about that. We are artists, we too run the risk that we might be creating trash. That isn't up to us to decide. He was an artist who knew what he wanted to do and did it, all his life. He carved his own path and we admire that. Sometimes more than the work, we learn from the life of other artists how to follow our beliefs even when the world is against you.
06.03.25
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