How the art establishment helped paedophile painter Graham Ovenden get away with child abuse for 20 yearsGuilty of six counts of indecency with a child and one of indecent assault
Ovenden sexually abused under-aged sitters in his paintings
The abused girls were all aged between six and 14
The Tate showed Ovenden's pictures of naked girls in its galleries
By GEOFFREY LEVY FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 22:45 GMT, 5 April 2013 | UPDATED: 08:48 GMT, 6 April 2013
Nearly 20 years have passed since police from the Child Protection squad banged on the door of the celebrated artist and photographer Graham Ovenden, searched his Cornish home and packaged up hundreds of images of naked children they considered to be obscene.
From that moment the art establishment, in all its pompous glory, has been defending Ovenden’s sexually suggestive works on the grounds (note this, mere mortals) that art must not be confused with porn.
Such was the furore raised by the art world over the 1994 arrest of the artist — whose works were selling for up to £25,000 — that, to the incredulity of Scotland Yard, the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to charge him.
Fifteen years later the police were back with another search warrant, and this time he was charged with having indecent images of children on his computer. He was acquitted.
Each of these episodes was seen as a victory for art itself and gave rise to learned articles explaining, for example, how Ovenden’s re-creation of pre-Raphaelite photography permitted candid child nudity. One London gallery even put on an exhibition of work under the title The Obscene Publications Squad Versus Art.
So it was quite a shockwave that hit the art world this week when Ovenden, now 70, was exposed as a devious paedophile who sexually abused some of his innocent young sitters.
Ovenden’s pose of genial respectability was torn away as he was found guilty at Truro Crown Court of six counts of indecency with a child and one of indecently assaulting a child. All took place before his first arrest. The children, all girls, were aged between six and 14.
Even the Tate, home of British art, which has always stoically stood by him, at last decided it had little choice but to remove its collection of 34 works — including naked child images — from its website. Nor will the works any longer be available to view by appointment.
A spokesman said his convictions ‘shone a new light’ on his work. Indeed so. The police could have told them that years ago.
But then, down the years, Ovenden — who has a son and daughter by estranged wife Annie, a fellow artist whom he married in 1969 —
always had powerful supporters. These included celebrated artists such as David Hockney, Sir Peter Blake and Sir Hugh Casson, as well as Sir Piers Rodgers, the non-artist former secretary of the Royal Academy.
And despite the shocking turn of events, twice-married Sir Piers, 68, still has no qualms about his support for Ovenden’s child images.‘I did stand up for him when he was attacked in the mid-1990s and I think I was right to do so,’ he says. ‘There was no question, as far as we knew, of his having touched or abused any of the children he painted. He made images of children and we [the Royal Academy] felt that they were legitimate.
Any other view would make many of the great masterpieces pornography in an utterly ridiculous way.
‘The depiction of children in itself seemed to us to be unobjectionable. We supported Graham Ovenden in that. If I had thought that his intent was to get sexual gratification from young children I wouldn’t have supported it.’
It remains surprising, however, that the art world, with its many flamboyant ‘experts’, didn’t spot just what Graham Ovenden really had in mind by looking at his collection of drawings called Aspects Of Lolita.This is a series of suggestive drawings depicting the 12-year-old girl lusted after by a middle-aged professor in the Nabokov novel Lolita, published in 1955.
One critic this week described Ovenden’s Lolita images as seeming ‘quite baldly and
openly sexual in a way that dares the onlooker to accuse him of something’.A number of them of them, including Lolita Seductive, Lolita Meditating and Lolita Recumbent — images of a naked or semi-clothed pre-pubescent girl in different poses — could until this week be seen at the Tate.
A second-hand, hardback, 48-page copy of Aspects Of Lolita was on offer on Amazon this week at just under £1,275.
So is there anything in his background to suggest a predeliction for very young girls? Not on the face of it.
Ovenden enjoyed an idyllic childhood in Hampshire.
He grew up in a Fabian household, and the poet John Betjeman was a family friend. After school, he studied at the Royal College of Art and befriended the pop artist Sir Peter Blake, best known for creating the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover for the Beatles.
Ovenden has said his main interest is in English landscapes. But what he became famous — and then notorious — for were his studies of girls, and his paintings hung in the world’s most respected galleries.
Only now, after his conviction, are some observers finding a new significance in Ovenden leaving London for Cornwall in 1975 and founding with a group of fellow artists the so-called Brotherhood of Ruralists which took a traditional, backward-looking view of art.
In Cornwall, he settled on an estate called Barley Splatt on the edge of Bodmin Moor. Its eccentric house of Cornish granite, complete with turrets and slit windows, was set in 22 acres of grounds with a beech wood, pastureland and a tumbling stream. It was here that Ovenden entertained fellow artists, writers, musicians . . . and children.
When he gave evidence at Truro Crown Court, Ovenden portrayed Barley Spratt as a hidden Eden, where children could live as nature intended. They were encouraged to run free — and naked when it was warm.
The jury was told that Ovenden was a man of good character, with no convictions, cautions or reprimands. The artist denied the abuse ever happened. He told the court he had taken pictures of children—- including those in various states of undress — but said they were not indecent.
In evidence, Ovenden said there was a ‘witch-hunt’ against those who produce work involving naked children and he accused police of ‘falsifying’ images recovered from his home computer
He argued that he had a ‘moral obligation’ to show children in a ‘state of grace’. The idea of pictures of naked children being obscene was ‘abhorrent’.
His artistic haven in Cornwall, where he encouraged girls to pose, provided the perfect opportunity for him to create ‘fine art’ images that echoed some of the 19th century pornographic pictures of children that emerged in the early years of photography.
In this context, although it makes difficult reading, it is worth repeating just a part of what prosecuting counsel Ramsay Quaife told the jury in Truro this week.
He described how Ovenden would dress the children in Victorian-style nighties before leaving them naked and blindfolded, then get them to perform what he called ‘taste tests’.
‘The defendant would put tape over her eyes,’ said Mr Quaife. ‘She could not see anything. The tape was black, stretchy and smelt of glue.
‘Although she could not see, she could hear the defendant and she could remember the sound of his belt buckle.
‘The defendant would tell her she would do a taste test and would get 10p for every taste she got right. He would then push something into her mouth . . . he told her it was his thumb.’
In fact, Ovenden was performing a disgusting indecent assault on the girl.
Prosecutor Mr Quaife also described how naked girls with taped eyes were moved into different positions and photographed so that their genitals could be seen.
Until this week,
Ovenden’s defence against allegations of his pictures of children being pornographic was to use mockery — depicting his accusers as ignorant philistines. On the second occasion he was arrested — and charged with having indecent images of children on his computer and making indecent images — he bizarrely paraphrased Shakespeare’s Hamlet to the police officers, telling them ‘it is but skin and film’.
The case against him was lost that time when the Crown Prosecution Service failed to call as witnesses two key police officers without whom, said the angry judge, a fair trial was not possible. The freed Ovenden accused the police of being ‘transfixed by childhood sexuality’.
After that, in a series of interviews, Ovenden grandly declared: ‘You should not create a neurosis about child nudity. The pervert is the one who puts the fig-leaf on.’
And: ‘A man once told me that each time he looked at a photograph of a [naked] child the first thing he looked as was the genitals. Surely that makes him the pervert and not me.’
It all sounded so high-minded and grave, this fine-art speak. And with the art world’s support, his life and his work continued uninterrupted, his seedy obsessions impregnable as ‘art’.
It is a situation which comes as no surprise to Brian Sewell, the distinguished art critic and commentator.
‘In my experience whenever the police have attacked artists’ work, the police have lost every time,’ he says. ‘
The art world does seem to have rules of its own. Whether it should or not is another matter.
‘Pictures of nude figures can be beautiful works of art, of course. If, on the other hand, you’re setting out to make an erotic photograph, then this is indefensible, because you are setting out not to remind people of the beauty of the human body, the skin, the eyes, but to remind them of what arouses lust.’
But how does one know an artist’s true intention? ‘I certainly do not know what Ovenden had in mind,’ says Sewell, ‘but he should have known very well the consequences of what he was doing. He should have behaved differently. He has only himself to blame.’
And yet, even after his conviction, for which he is on bail awaiting a likely jail sentence, Ovenden has still not been cast adrift by dedicated supporters.
Among his staunchest defenders are the art-loving explorer and author Robin Hanbury-Tenison, 76, and his wife Louella,
a former High Sheriff of Cornwall. Indeed, an Ovenden portrait of one of their sons — fully clothed — hangs in the sitting room of their manor house.
‘I simply do not believe Graham is capable of the allegations made against him,’ declares Mrs Hanbury-Tenison. ‘They are not credible in my view.’
Her husband adds: ‘These accounts are coming from women who are now in their 40s. One wonders why it has taken so long. I find it outrageous that there is shock-horror at him having painted little girls naked in the Sixties and Seventies. For this to be compared with the gross activities of people like Jimmy Savile or the appalling pornography on the internet — it just defies belief.
‘The blindfolding of a child [for art] — yes, I can see what he was trying to do in representing innocence and justice.
‘But it is the last gasp of puritanism to be concentrating on somehow making that innocence of childhood into something vulgar.’
As for Ovenden’s pictures of children, the great explorer says that the European art world is ‘laughing at Britain over its obsession with this matter’, adding: ‘As Oscar Wilde said, there is “no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality”.’Oh lucky man, Graham Ovenden, to have such loyal friends.
Sir Piers Rodgers, too, says he would not change the decision he took in 1995. ‘I would probably continue to take the same view now about his work that I did then,’ he admits. ‘What is obscenity is a matter of judgment.’
Too true, and most of us will be forming our own judgments about Ovenden’s ‘art’ in the light of this week’s court case.
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