Matthew Collings is best known as a broadcaster, critic and artist who helped introduce large audiences to modern art with his combination of knowledge and humour. He has appeared on screen with the likes of Tracey Emin, and won acclaim for defying the traditional, stuffy arts programmes with something livelier and altogether more fun. Collings hosted Channel 4’s coverage of the Turner Prize and won a Bafta for his own series, This is Modern Art.
Now 70, Collings finds himself at the centre of a media storm after the opening of an exhibition of his work in Margate, Kent, that critics claim contain “anti-Semitic tropes”. Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, criticised the local Labour council for “supporting an openly anti-Semitic exhibition. These pictures are dripping with sickening anti-Semitic tropes, and all those involved in this should hang their heads in shame”.
The works include drawings of blood-drenched Israeli soldiers standing amid piles of skulls, two staff at Sotheby’s – the auction house owned by the French-Israeli Patrick Drahi – eating babies with blood dripping down their sharpened teeth and the Nazi swastika near the Star of David. Collings denies that his works are anti-Semitic, but that his “target is always Zionism”.
The exhibition, Drawings Against Genocide, features drawings allegedly showing Jewish people eating babies – Matthew Collings
This is not the first time that Collings has caused controversy. Collings reviewed for London’s Evening Standard following the death of the long-serving Brian Sewell in 2015, in what would prove to be the end of his mainstream career as an art critic. At the paper, he made no secret of his Left-wing, anti-Brexit political leanings – in one review, of a William Blake retrospective at Tate Britain in 2019, he appeared to compare the leader of the Labour Party to a deity. “Unasked for meaning rushes in too. A Jeremy Corbyn god rolls a sun along the ground as if he’s rolling away Boris Johnson’s no deal: a British lion laughs.”
His being an out-and-proud Corbynista was not why he ended up losing his sinecure at the Evening Standard, which at the time was edited by former Conservative chancellor, George Osborne. Collings was selected as the Labour candidate to contest South West Norfolk – the parliamentary seat held by Liz Truss, who was then international trade secretary – at the 2019 general election. However, he was removed after one day following the emergence of social media posts in which he dismissed allegations of anti-Semitism in Jeremy Corbyn’s party as a “witch hunt”, and described a former chief rabbi as a “notorious hate-filled racist”. His Evening Standard column quietly disappeared.
“It’s around 2019 where he suddenly – or seemingly suddenly, in my mind – went really off the boil on Twitter [X] and got very anti-Zionist to a point where it became uncomfortable,” a former colleague says. “Since then, it’s gone from bad to worse, and now he’s doing this crap art… We are where we are now, which is a pretty f—ing awful state.”
Someone who has encountered Collings on-and-off over the years says that his career “seems so divided”, in the sense that he was for a long time “in the thick of things”, but then “completely dropped out” before “suddenly doing really well with his pictures”.
Other drawings feature blood-drenched Israeli soldiers standing amid piles of skulls – Matthew Collings
In the years after the Covid-19 pandemic started, the newly-unemployed Collings made thousands of drawings about art history that became commercially lucrative after he posted them on his Instagram account. His conceit was to draw artists (and other historical figures) from different times and places, and put them together, like a visualised fantasy dinner party. The Beatles feature, as do members of the Royal family, Jesus Christ and Friedrich Nietzsche. Hilma af Klint and Philip Guston also often appear.
Collings had a tumultuous upbringing. In 2023, he told the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Alaska that “American suicide poets of the 1950s allowed me to explore ideas about my father, who [died by] suicide before I was born”, and that “family madness, severe material and emotional deprivation” were “in the background” of his life.
“All that contributed to an outsider-insider mentality I’ve always had in relation to art as social climbing or society’s celebration of art as a celebration of privilege,” he added. “The irresponsible reason-unreason off [sic] the sequence and the drawings generally, is a related syndrome.”
When he was six, both Collings and his mother were under observation for psychosis at a mental hospital. “She was mad as a hatter,” as the explanatory text for one of his recent exhibitions explained, “and he was sent to a children’s home for seven years. Then he was kidnapped to Canada when he was 14, and brought back by Scotland Yard after a worldwide police search involving Interpol and the FBI.” Writing in the third person about himself in The Observer almost 25 years ago, Collings said that what had actually happened was “a campaigner for world peace gave him money to run off to Canada, and he was picked up by Interpol and the Mounties”.
Collings was a judge on BBC Two’s School of Saatchi in 2009 (pictured with fellow panellists Frank Cohen, Tracey Emin, Kate Bush, and Rebecca Wilson)
After studying painting at the now-closed Byam Shaw School of Art, he moved into the world of art magazines such as Artscribe, which he was credited with transforming as editor in the 1980s. By the end of that decade, he had become a producer and presenter for The Late Show on the BBC, and took a degree at Goldsmith’s.
Collings later had a long-lasting professional relationship and friendship with David Bowie. The pop superstar’s publishing house released his book on British art, Blimey! – From Bohemia to Britpop: London Art World from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst, in 1997.
“Before I met him at the London launch for Blimey!, my mother told me he’d rung her up recently. I asked him about it, and he said it was true,” Collings recalled. “She’d written a letter to him in a breakdown addressed ‘David Bowie BBC’. It somehow got to the BBC and was forwarded to his management. He kindly phoned and was very calm. He told her about his schizophrenic half-brother, Terry.”
Unlike many of his fellow critics, Collings had always remained a practising artist whose views on others’ work were informed by developments in his own. “There’s nothing quite like the pleasure of painting,” he wrote in The Observer in 2009. “The subtle nuances of differences, one colour next to another, each affecting how the other is seen. They build up on the canvas one by one. Through a mixture of observation and instinct, you must navigate these many different patches until they blend seamlessly and realistically.”
Subtle nuance appears to be absent from his new show in Kent. The exhibition was closed when The Telegraph visited Margate on Monday afternoon, as it is due to run from Thursday until Sunday. The gallery building itself, which is located on an unprepossessing street near the centre of town, is named after a tenant from the Victorian era and has variously been a boat builder and seaside rock factory. Across the road lies a large branch of Poundstretcher, the budget retailer.
The Margate exhibition is due to run from Thursday March 26 until the following Sunday – Matthew Collings
Before the Margate exhibition opened at the weekend, Collings posted excerpts of his work on Facebook. He claimed that “today Israel is murdering Muslims and no artists say anything”, implying that he had missed the frequent protestations about the war in Gaza from the artistic community since the conflict began in the aftermath of the Hamas massacre of Oct 7 2023.
Despite what Collings says, the lasting impact of the Israel-Hamas war, as well as conflicts that the Jewish state has had in recent years, from Iran to Lebanon, has, in actual fact, caused ructions in the art world. Almost 200 artists and curators involved in this year’s Venice Biennale, which runs from May until November, have signed an open letter calling for Israel to be excluded from the jamboree “in solidarity with Palestine”.
Since the Margate furore started, after the Jewish Sunday Telegraph columnist, Zoe Strimpel, visited the exhibition and confronted Collings, he has addressed criticism by posting on his Facebook page. He claimed, without evidence, that “this was a coordinated effort to produce a two-tier chilling effect: a direct one against me personally, through intimidation; and an indirect one aimed at younger artists who might think twice for fear of losing commissions or exhibition opportunities”.
Collings does not appear to have been cowed by the public backlash to his latest work. In a comment on the Labour MP Nadia Whittome’s Instagram account, Collings asked whether anybody thought the arson attack on a Jewish volunteer ambulance service on Sunday night was a “false flag” (i.e. that the victims had done it themselves in order to pin the blame on someone else).
“I always did get a slightly mad, eccentric vibe from him – but in a way felt quite harmless and affable,” says the former colleague who has worked with him. “Over time, that madness became no longer quite mad, but very mad. And, actually, very nasty.”
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