Jack Vettriano (1951-2025) and the Art of Alienation

US readers may be unfamiliar with the Scottish artist Jack Vettriano, who was found dead in his apartment in Nice, France, on March 1. His only major New York exhibition was scheduled for fall 2001 and cancelled in the aftermath of 9/11. Original paintings have, however, been bought by wealthy patrons, including prominent actors, rock musicians, and sports personalities. The main cultural impact in the UK has, though, been through the sale of reproductions, posters and other artefacts. These were estimated to bring an income of $750,000 per year in the early 2000s and funded a comfortable lifestyle with homes in Scotland, London and the South of France. It is a long way from his origins, as Jack Hoggan, in a poor mining family and early career as an engineer in a declining industry.

The published obituaries continue themes that had been endlessly rehearsed during his lifetime. Professional art critics dismissed his work as naïve and derivative – The Guardian’s critic described them as “‘”a double cheeseburger wrapped in greasy paper”’” that might just allow you to recognize superior food when you encountered it. Yet there is a paradox. Vettriano’s best-known painting, The Singing Butler, was sold at auction in 2004 for £744,000 (about £1.6 million or $2 million in 2024 prices). A parody, Crude Oil (Vettriano) by the street artist Banksy sold this month for £4.3 million ($5.4 million). Presumably, the Banksy version incorporated the “conceptual edge,” “sense of irony” and “postmodern self-awareness” the critic found missing in the original.

Perhaps the answer to the paradox lies more in sociology than art theory. Howard Becker’s study of art worlds brings the production of art into the classic Chicago frame of the sociology of occupations. Artistic creations should be understood as people’s work – and not just that of their assumed creator. They come out of a dense network of interactions between people bringing different skills – from the manufacturers of paint, canvas or frames to the valuers and auctioneers of the great galleries and sale houses. Art acquires its value from the passage of artefacts through this network, their combination and re-combination in different forms and contexts and their ultimate entry into a market place where buyers and their advisers construct a price that it is assumed to encode all of this hidden labor.

Vettriano was always on the margins of this network. As a self-taught artist, and a self-made man – changing his birth name to re-launch his life – he engaged with it peripherally and on his own terms. He never troubled to describe his work in the language of art critics. If he painted women naked or in the process of undressing, it was because they looked sexy – and sold – rather than as an explicit commentary on gender relations. But this did not mean that the commentary was absent. As Becker pointed out, the meaning of an art work is a matter of context and Vettriano’s was often placed in the wrong context. In this respect alone, he might be compared with LS Lowry, whose work was similarly disdained by critics but eventually came to be seen as an elegy for the disappearance of traditional industries and communities. Lowry’s matchstick figures suggested the insignificance of humans in an environment of mills and factories. Like Vettriano, Lowry rarely spoke about his art – he just painted what he saw in the way he thought appropriate.

In The Singing Butler a couple of indeterminate age, wearing evening dress, are dancing on a beach as a storm approaches. On either side of them are a maid and a butler, each struggling to hold an umbrella as a tempest approaches. This early work, from 1992, introduces themes that recur for many years. The isolation of the people – none are looking at the viewer. The umbrellas –Magritte paints these falling gently like rain but the servants here are trying to resist the squall. Something is trying to blow away this order. Are they dancing at Michael Moorcock’s end of time. Could they be On the Beach, probably the only Neville Shute novel that is still readable, which portrays the gradual disintegration of Australian society as the fall-out from a nuclear war drifts south. A storm is gathering that will sweep all away.

This sense of jeopardy becomes increasingly magnified over the years. Vettriano is acutely sensitive to the proximity of violence. His Provence is not the bright, shining world of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. It is a world of oligarchs and the young women who adorn their yachts, of drug-traffickers and prostitutes, of expatriates without human connection. The world conjured up by JG Ballard in Super-Cannes. Feminist critics have focused on his apparent objectification of women, because of his use of erotic tropes – black underwear, garter belts and stockings, tight corsets – but this is precisely the point. Sex here is transactional. His women do not lack agency. They will engage on their own terms – if the price is right. Vettriano often freezes scenes at that moment of negotiation and his representations hint at a whole range of interactions from the dominatrix to the dominated. What they all share is the lack of human connection. The characters rarely engage with the viewer: heads and backs are frequently turned away. Sometimes Vettriano enters the picture himself, as a proxy for the viewer, but is equally ignored. We are all turned into voyeurs as he shows us a world we would rather not see. But Vettriano has acknowledged his entanglements with it on our behalf.

Vettriano’s technique has frequently been questioned without much reference to his use of materials. Many of his pictures are lit in a way that reflects detailed study of Old Masters like Caravaggio, with dramatic contrasts between light and shade that shape our reading of character and action. But Vettriano is not operating with a studio full of apprentices making paints from scratch or working by candlelight on canvases to be viewed by candlelight. The contemporary art world is one of mass produced colors and incandescent lights. A coming generation of figurative painters will be working with the different colur temperatures of LEDs. Seventeenth century art would have looked very different with twenty first century technology. The question is less one of technique than of what is being done with it.

There are occasional moments of genuine intimacy. Two lovers cuddle on a porch in The Innocents . A passionate kiss marks a homecoming in Back Where You Belong. But these are rare. Vettriano is a painter of alienation in much the same vein as Edward Hopper. Both capture solitude, loneliness and the disconnection of lost souls. These are classic themes in urban sociology, not least that produced in Chicago. It is the world of Cressy’s Taxi-Dance Hall or less well-known studies like Frances Donovan’s accounts of the lives of women retail sales clerks or waitresses.

It is not necessary to make hyperbolic claims on Vettriano’s behalf. His paintings do not invite us to see the world anew in the same way as David Hockney’s. Vettriano does not force a reading of his work upon us. But a more sociological understanding points to merits that contemporary art theory does not acknowledge. It would not be a surprise to see some of the galleries and fine art collectors who are currently so dismissive scrambling to represent him in their collections within a generation.