A biting satire of the art world's glamour, pomp and greed

Telegraph

16-02-2025

Novels set in the 'art world', as it's often called, rarely take their milieu, or any of the people in it, seriously. More often, the international circuit of artists, dealers and collectors – and, of course, the gatekeeping curators and critics – appears as an object of ridicule: a self-important playground for the absurdly privileged. From first-hand experience, I can confirm that this isn't entirely unfair.
In his second novel, The Violet Hour, James Cahill blends predictable satire with a more unusual, earnest approach. He knows what he's talking about, having worked as an art critic and with galleries for the past 15 years; he also has a PhD in classics, which explored the influence of antiquity on today's artists. His 2022 debut, Tiepolo Blue, charted the unravelling of a buttoned-up art historian in 1990s Britain, just as the YBAs were on the rise: an uneven but promisingly uncommon novel. The Violet Hour takes place in the present, with an expanded cast of jet-setting characters, all fictional – although interspersed with references to real artists and institutions, and in some cases with what anyone who knows the industry might consider clear non-fictional counterparts.
Narrated in the close third-person, the story switches between the perspectives of a successful abstract painter called Thomas Haller; his long-time dealer, Lorna Bedford; and Leo Goffman, an elderly real-estate developer and 'collector' (as rich buyers are known). Early on, Leo calls up Lorna, hellbent on acquiring a painting which he saw in an ad for Thomas's latest show – a 'soft purple', like 'the sky at nightfall', with a 'dark fissure' near the middle – but Lorna informs him that the artist has recently defected to a competitor: Claude Berlins, an international mega-gallerist who has built a new outpost in London. Lorna, meanwhile, is preoccupied by the mystery of the death of one of Berlins' employees, who fell from a building in Vauxhall just before the opening of Thomas's show.
Gradually, the murky and interconnected pasts of these people are brought to light – and it becomes clear that, in The Violet Hour, the art world is less a professional network than an arena in which psychosexual dramas might play out. The tussle between dealers over Thomas is rooted not in the reliably high prices that his work commands – although it's true that 'panels of pure colour filled with plays of light' are the easiest kind of art to sell – but in intimate personal relationships that stretch back decades. Thomas harbours many of his own secrets, including what he knows about what happened that night in Vauxhall. Leo's acquisitive quest is really an attempt to distract from deep grief. Even a negative exhibition review, written by Lorna's on-and-off girlfriend Justine, is chalked up to 'jealousy and anguish… sublimated into art criticism'.
While Cahill's twists and reveals are fun, there's just too much going on, and a number of the characters come across more as ideas for characters than real people. (Justine, author of 'a self-help manual crossed with a takedown of neoliberalism', is particularly flat.) It doesn't help that Cahill's prose can be rather expository and uninspired. At the same time, though, there are flashes of emotion, moments of flair; take, for instance, the description of when Lorna reunites with Thomas after a six-year absence: 'The surprise of seeing his face (its very familiarity a surprise)'. And, as you might expect, but in contrast to what is usually found in fiction about the art world, the descriptions of artworks, both real and imagined, are lucid and evocative.
Perhaps the best element is the relatively secondary character of Leo Goffman. From the start, he's established as unremittingly horrible. He treats his housekeeper like a slave; he knocks a woman over with his car, and shows no contrition when she dies. Worst of all, he subscribes to art magazines for the adverts: he likes Artforum because there's 'not too much bulls--- editorial'. And yet: some of the passages devoted to him are by far the most original and beguiling here. As his health deteriorates, Leo becomes haunted by a hallucination of a 'beast' with bristling fur and rancid breath. It's unclear what the beast symbolises: it could be desire, or death, or both. Cahill's novel is better for allowing this strangeness in.