A painter all his life, a painter for whom drawing lay in every brushstroke, a painter who could draw with such precision that it was as an engraver that he won a scholarship to the British School in Rome, he had nothing but contempt for the fashionable nostrums that in the Swinging Sixties began to overtake art as he knew it – not for him the flabby flapping canvases to which even the Royal Academy then opened its doors, not for him the caprice that to become an artist a student had merely to have ideas that broke the ancestral boundaries of art and amused misguided theorists, not for him the near dominant notion that gigantic scale is an acceptable substitute for both craftsman execution and intellectual idea.

It was his conviction that the intense and trenchant small canvas might be an effective discipline in reversing the overwhelming trend toward the vapid flaccid large, and after a thousand discussions in a thousand pubs, Michael flushed and furious, aggressive and often foul-mouthed with frustration, a casual entertainment for the onlooker, conceived The Discerning Eye. This open exhibition restricted to small works of art, with associated prizes, was long in parturition: a birthplace was needed, a permanent home, sponsorship and some sympathy from at least some part of the establishment too, but Michael, never the diplomat, was not the proper man to find them. They were, nevertheless, eventually found, and the annual exhibition got off to a surprisingly good start in 1990, the range of judges – two critics, two artists and two collectors – seeming to ensure a wider, more generous, less doctrinaire approach than, for example, those of the Turner Prize. Alas, too many critics followed their own agendas, often entirely contrary to the purposes of The Discerning Eye as conceived by Michael, and 'collectors' became a euphemism for celebrities brought in to attract publicity. When the Eye began to stumble, Michael (who would have liked to do all the selecting himself), feeling that subversion had corrupted his ideals and that he himself was about to be usurped, became, first, even more rancorous and vituperative, and then, in 1996, abandoned his brilliant baby. Soon after, still bruised, he abandoned Britain too, and went to live in Groningen, there to be 'adopted' by a married couple who, in indulging him, gentled his combative nature and gave him peace enough to develop a late flowering – these last nudes and portraits are among his best.

When cancer, taking its time, killed him in April this year, that in the obituary columns of our greater newspapers he was given more attention than ever in their arts pages, would have tickled Michael's wry humour. But one thing about them caused me some considerable distress; it was that the obituarists gave me almost as much credit as Michael for establishing The Discerning Eye. I had little to do with its nuts and bolts. He bent my ear; I held his hand. It was a sound idea, I supported it; and when it began, he and I together worked our way through the thousands of works submitted – for us there could be no preliminary weeding. My only misgiving about the structure of The Discerning Eye lay in selecting the judges, for it was always my belief that only those who wholeheartedly supported Michael's aims should be appointed – democracy has no part to play in even the smallest plot to change the art world.

'Tell Brian to protect my reputation' was Michael's deathbed admonition to a mutual friend – a heavy burden for a critic who knows how fragile that reputation is. Michael was never more than an exhibitor at the Royal Academy – never an ARA or RA; the state did not offer him a gong – a CBE might have amused him; the British Council did not exhibit his work in any of their far-flung circuses; the National Portrait Gallery almost rejected his last portrait of Bernard Haitink – 'the best thing I ever did,' he thought; and, gadfly and maverick that he thought himself, he was in every aspect of his life and work, an outsider. His founding The Discerning Eye is the only peg on which I can hang his reputation, this annual event a reminder of the man, his beliefs, his work and his integrity. Long may it last.

 

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