Jonathan Jones reviews Maggi Hambling: ‘If she’s a painter, I’m Rembrandt’

National Gallery, London
A total lack of integrity distinguishes Hambling’s latest collection of daft daubs, which pastiche Pollock, Van Gogh and Monet to loathsome effect

I think of the National Gallery as a supremely tasteful place. It is a temple of high culture, revered around the world for its serious atmosphere and immaculate collection of European art. So what bizarre brainwave made its curators invite Maggi Hambling to put on an exhibition here?

Hambling is proof that you can be a well-known artist without having a soul, a brain or a good eye. She is a “painter”. Yeah, and I’m Rembrandt. People who hate conceptual art like to pretend that before the Turner prize came along, Britain was an arcadia of sensitive and skilled painters. Go and see Hambling’s daft daubs if you want proof of the emptiness of that claim. She is a painter all right, but neither sensitive nor skilled, nor imaginative, or anything else I value in art.

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