Brian Alfred Christopher Bushell Sewell (; 15 July 1931 – 19 September 2015) was an English art critic. He wrote for the Evening Standard and had an acerbic view of conceptual art and the Turner Prize. The Guardian described him as "Britain's most famous and controversial art critic", while the Standard called him the "nation’s best art critic". Early life Sewell was born on 15 July 1931, in Hammersmith, London, taking his mother's surname, Perkins. The man who in later life he claimed was his father, composer Philip Heseltine, better known as Peter Warlock, died of coal gas poisoning seven months before Sewell was born. Brian was brought up in Kensington, west London, and elsewhere by his mother, Mary Jessica Perkins, who married Robert Sewell in 1936. He was educated at the private Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School in Hampstead, northwest London. Offered a place to read history at Oxford, Sewell instead chose to enter the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, where his tutors included Anthony Blunt, who became his close friend. Sewell graduated in 1957 and worked at Christie's auction house, specialising in Old Master paintings and drawings. After leaving Christie's he became an art dealer. He completed his National Service as a commissioned officer in the Royal Army Service Corps. He took LSD as a young man, describing it in 2007 as a drug "for people of my age. It's wonderful. The one thing you could not do, however, was drip it into your eyeballs. It sent you absolutely bonkers." In 1979, after Blunt's exposure as the fourth man in the Cambridge spy ring, gaining much media attention, Sewell assisted in sheltering him in Chiswick. Art criticism Following the Blunt affair, Sewell was hired as art critic for Tina Brown's revitalised Tatler magazine. In 1984, he replaced the avant-garde critic Richard Cork as art critic for the Evening Standard. He won press awards including Critic of the Year (1988), Arts Journalist of the Year (1994), the Hawthornden Prize for Art Criticism (1995) and the Foreign Press Award (Arts) in 2000. In April 2003, he was awarded the Orwell Prize for his Evening Standard column. In criticisms of the Tate Gallery's art, he coined the term "Serota tendency" after its director Nicholas Serota. Although Sewell appeared on BBC Radio 4 in the early 1990s, it was not until the late 1990s that he became a household figure through