The Rembrandt of Riyadh

MASTER STROKES

“The thing about being a painter,” Andrew Vicari, who has claims to being the most lavishly rewarded painter in the world, was saying, “is that every night you go to bed thinking the work you have done that day is fabulous. And then you wake up the next morning and look at your canvas and think it is worthless, a piece of junk, and you start again.”

We were travelling on the upper deck of a double-decker bus along London’s Piccadilly in early December, on the way to meet the artist’s manager. Vicari, a heavyset man in a big coat, gestured outside in exaggerated despondency. “Sometimes I see pavement artists, working in chalk, work that the rain will wash away,” he said, “and I think: Is Vicari really any better than any of them?” He looked me in the eye, clutched my arm. “I mean, am I?”

“Well,” I said, ducking the answer, “street artists are paid in pennies. What’s the most you have been paid for a single picture?”

Vicari scoffed. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, dismissively, “I’m not interested in the money. It is entirely secondary to the work.” And then he brightened a little. “Six million dollars, maybe.”

Andrew Vicari, now in his 70s, grew up in a steelmaking town in South Wales. During World War II, his father, an Italian immigrant and restaurateur, was interned, and Vicari’s earliest memories are of going to see him, behind barbed wire. In his late teens, he was initially refused a place at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in London, where instructors included Lucian Freud, but then someone dropped out, and he sneaked in. Vicari now lives most of the time in Monte Carlo, where he is friend to Prince Albert and sometime painter to Princess Caroline.

Until recently, he divided his time between there and Saudi Arabia, where he made his fortune by producing an extended tribute in oils to several generations of the Saudi royal family. Vicari — who was in London to complete a portrait of the commander of the queen’s household cavalry — is about the last of a dying breed: a court painter. And like all court painters, he is full of gossip.

After we met several times, some of the stories had become old friends. There was the one about how Vicari dated Einstein’s great-niece and got to know a bit about “Uncle Albert.” There was the time he danced with the queen’s sister, Princess Margaret; the time he turned down a lunch date with Catherine Deneuve. If you were to trace these stories back to a single potent event, then you would have to say Vicari’s life changed most radically one morning in 1974 when he boarded a plane at Heathrow Airport with two friends, a former diplomat and a development consultant with an interest in Middle Eastern affairs. When he got on that plane, Vicari was under the impression, he says that he was going to meet a client of his associates in Rio-de- Janeiro. It was only when he asked for a glass of Champagne from the cabin crew and was told they could offer only orange juice that he realise they were in fact bound for Riyadh. “Christ,” he said. “All that sand.”

There were, he soon discovered, compensations. In the mid-’70s the Saudi royal family and government, awash in petro dollars, was keen to create a mythology to establish its secular power. In the previous decade, nascent fundamentalist Islamic groups had pursued a policy in Medina of “the breaking of the pictures” (taksir al-suwar), destroying portraits and photographs of Saudi royalty, believing them to be idolatrous.

To demonstrate its imperial pedigree, the House of Saud required art. In 1974, a grand conference hall was to be built in Riyadh that would welcome the oil traders and arms dealers and property developers of the world; it would need to be decorated with a suitably regal narrative. Enter Andrew Vicari.

Vicari, who refers to Riyadh as “the Vatican of Islam,” set to work with gusto. He was initially dispatched across the kingdom, with an architect and a chauffeur, in search of inspiration. When he returned to Riyadh, Vicari revealed his suitably flattering concept to his patrons: he would make 60 vast paintings that would tell a vivid story of the rise to power of the House of Saud, called “The Triumph of the Bedouin.”

Vicari lived for two years in a suite at the Intercontinental Hotel in Riyadh and painted every day on a monumental scale at the King Faisal Hall. Vicari, whose life looks a lot like a manifesto for being in the right place at the right time, claims he was “outrageous” at the Saudi palace. “I used to insult people.” Vicari was expected to make his portraits of Faisal’s successor, Khalid, and his family, from photographs. He insisted on doing so from life. He was eventually granted an audience with the king, in the company of the deputy chief of protocol. “I insulted the king of Saudi Arabia,” he says. He was, he recalls, telling the king to move his arm this way or that, and the deputy chief of protocol was yelling at him: “Don’t address him, address me!” In the end, though, he got the portrait.

He also got paid. When he talks about money, Vicari, never a notably precise man, becomes vaguer than ever. In the year when his wealth made the most headlines, 2001, he sold a series of paintings about the Persian Gulf war for “about £17m,”; The Sunday Times of London calculated that Vicari was then the 18th richest living Briton. In 2010, the same paper’s list calculated his wealth at £85 million.

Most of Vicari’s work includes a signature swirl or vortex, like a dying sun, which he calls “a vigonade,” a word he made up at a bar called Chez Vigon in Nice. What does “the vigonade” signify? “People say it is an enigma, but it is much more mysterious than that.”
Vicari’s grandfather was a circus owner, and you can sense some of that theatrical lugubriousness in him. He says he is obsessed with comedy, and with death. This started early. “My father,” he says, “saw it and arranged for me to go to the local
slaughterhouse in Wales, and I helped to kill 200 sheep. I was about 16, 17.” He recalls the carnage, shakes his head. “I didn’t do the pigs because the squeals were unbearable. Just the sheep. It’s all in the work. People say where does the power of my work come from? And I say three things. Menace, menace and menace.”

But he often paints peasant girls with bunches of flowers? “Menace.” What about his “Virgin and Gypsy” series? “Menace.” His soulful-looking harlequins? “Menace. It’s in me. As they said of Michelangelo: Sweet and terrible.”

It was partly this compulsion to understand violence, Vicari says, that led him to persuade the Saudis to make him the official war artist in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. His sponsor was Prince Khalid Bin Sultan, the joint commander of the allied forces with General Schwarzkopf.

Initially, he was stuck at the command centre, but pestered his clients to allow him access to the battlefield. He then set to work on a series of pictures called ‘From War to Peace: The Liberation of Kuwait’. The last portrait he made was of General Schwarzkopf. For a long while after the paintings were completed, there was a dispute about Vicari’s price. In hushed tones he claims to have had an offer of $8 million for the series from the Iranian government, which supposedly wanted to destroy the paintings. In the end, he sold the bulk of them to Prince Khalid Bin Sultan for what was reportedly three times that amount.

In recent years, Vicari has been going to Saudi Arabia much less often. Typically undaunted by the turn of fashion against him, however, he is looking farther afield for new patrons and still following the money. India and China are currently the markets that interest him the most. When I met him in December, in London, three new large portraits of Gandhi were propped against a table. We stood and studied the unhinged and bespectacled triptych, loosely part of an ongoing series of Icons of the 20th Century, which ranges from Walt Disney to the Pakistani pop star Abrar Ul Haq. I asked Vicari whether it ever irritates him that he seems to be appreciated only a very long way from home?

He answered by describing a recent visit to a Van Gogh exhibition in Amsterdam. It filled him with awe and wonder. And doubt. “When I came out,” he said, “I thought, I am not going to paint anymore. Nothing seemed worth it.” But then another little voice in his head, the one that has allowed him to get where he is today, countered with a different thought: “But Van Gogh was mad, and Vicari is not. Your paintings should not be along that line: not mad.” “So that,” he said, “is what I have aimed for.” “Sanity?” I said. “Exactly,” he said.