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Damien Hirst - No Love Lost

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Wallace Collection, W1

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Stop it, Damien Hirst, you're embarrassing yourself

 

Inexperienced execution: Skull with Ashtray and Lemon, 2006/07

Old and new idioms: Requiem, White Roses and Butterflies, 2008

The Laughing Cavalier, painted by Frans Hals in 1624, is one of the greatest treasures of the Wallace Collection.

That this roguish anonymous gentleman is indeed laughing has been a matter of dispute since the title was coined in the later 19th century, but as it has become canonical and the image iconic, the questions "why?" and "at what?" have not been much asked in recent years.

Now, however, almost four centuries after his depiction, he has a wry reason for his laughter, for a guffaw must be the sane man's immediate reaction to the puerile and maladroit paintings by Damien Hirst, newly installed in neighbouring rooms for the next three months or so.

They are, for the most part, of human skulls. That Hirst, like Turner in his day (see the current exhibition at Tate Britain), has great paintings of the past in his mind with this display of his own very recent work is not in doubt, for Poussin's Dance to the Music of Time now hangs in the Great Gallery so that it can be seen - though so distantly and dimly as to be inscrutable - as an adjunct to his skulls.

This interpretation of it as a simple memento mori is naive - the subject, dictated to Poussin by Pope Clement IX, is far more complicated than this.

The Hals Cavalier is a far stronger image to be seen at such a range, but his imminent laughter might prove a subversive influence on everyone flanked about by Hirst's phalanx of skulls.

These, I have no doubt, were painted with high seriousness, if for no other reason than that they must sell for millions (perhaps they should not be exposed to such a risk), for as original works from the very hand of Hirst himself, each must surely rank higher as a work of art than any such multiple workshop offering as the notorious diamond-encrusted skull.

Alas, however, these paintings are shoddy, slip-slop and derivative, not of Poussin or Frans Hals - the latter has a wonderful painting of a skull in the National Gallery - but of Francis Bacon, whose work Hirst crudely mimics but does not understand.

At vast expense, Hirst has provided new hangings for the gallery walls, striped moiré silk in an aquamarine blue that conjures the spirit of dix-huitième France in an attempt to influence our opinion of his daubs.

At vast expense, he has framed his canvases as Bacon did, primarily in silver and gold, sheet glass both obscuring the images with reflections and lending mysterious depth.

But, discounting these Baconian tricks of presentation and concentrating only on the canvases, we have nothing but the wretched incomprehensions of the first-year student cribbing from an acknowledged master.

As well as human skulls, the constituents of these still lives are Hirst's familiar idioms of the cigarette, the ashtray, the spot and the butterfly; the new elements are sharks' jawbones, the skeleton of an iguana, lemons, the hint of landscape and a composition with a vase of flowers that must be a gross enlargement of one by Bosschaert or Van der Ast early in the 17th century.

All these are painted in white-toned blue on backgrounds of disturbed black that recall Derek Jarman's late paintings.

Were Hirst's canvases the work of a late teenager, we might take the random lines around the skulls as a clever allusion to the measuring-points of a sculptor of Canova's generation, or as an illusion of cracked glass, and forgive the ugly clumsiness of inexperienced execution; but Hirst is nearing his half-century and should have a far higher level of skill than this rough daubing, with which he degrades his master, Bacon.

Is Damien his own worst enemy? He claims these caricatures of Bacon to be "deeply connected with the past", but it is a past no earlier than the last quarter of the century in which he was born.

He is vain enough to proclaim that his work as Bacon's shallow pasticheur belongs in the Wallace Collection with paintings by Rembrandt and Velázquez, Titian and Van Dyck, but one minute spent in the Great Gallery with these is enough to prove the arrogance of this delusion.

Are then his uncritical friends, allies and advisers his worst enemies - those who daily greet him with "Oh King, live for ever" and tell him he can do no wrong?

Has Ros Savill, directrice of the Wallace Collection, done him a great disservice in her foolish desperation to increase the number of the museum's visitors by exhibiting so notorious and filthy-rich an artist? The exposure should do no good to either herself or Hirst.

The exhibition is supported by the usual events performed by the usual lackeys who can be trusted to "Praise him, praise him, praise him" - including Tim Marlow, a director of White Cube, the art dealership most closely associated with Hirst's huge commercial success (only in the arts could so crass a conflict of interest be ignored).

It is accompanied by a catalogue in which all 29 canvases are illustrated, but in no way illuminated by the text of a conversation in The Pig and Whistle between Hirst and John Hoyland, the grand old bore of British bucket-and-slosh abstract painting.

In this the words most used and most superfluous are fuck and its derivatives - the fucking chair, fucking debris, fucking rectangle, fucking artist, fucking unbelievable

I take this as licence, for this occasion only, to declare this detestable exhibition fucking dreadful.

No Love Lost, Blue Paintings by Damien Hirst is at the Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, W1 (020 7563 9500, www.wallacecollection.org) until 24 January. Admission free.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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