LEADING Modernists took their turn yesterday to review the artistic efforts of Kim Howells, the Culture Minister who dismissed this year’s Turner Prize entrants as “conceptual bullshit”.

The minister likes to paint portraits and landscapes during parliamentary breaks. Anish Kapoor, who won the Turner Prize in 1991, ridiculed Dr Howells’s paintings as “perfectly ordinary”. The artist, who studied at the Hornsey School of Art, as did Dr Howells, said the minister’s comments reeked of a controlling state. Dinos Chapman, a leading avant-garde artist, said: “People in his position should be more guarded in public.” Kapoor, whose sculpture Marsyas, a 155 metre structure of blood-red fabric and black steel, dominates Tate Modern’s main hall in London, said: “There are many different ways to be an artist. This is what keeps art as a vibrant culture. The Sunday painting school always rears its head at the Turner. They should stay at home.”

He said that Dr Howells’s efforts at painting were “not particularly good, not particularly bad, just perfectly adequate and ordinary.”

Dr Howells was so infuriated by the Turner entries on Wednesday that he left his critique on a comment card pinned to a wall. The four contenders are Fiona Banner, whose work includes a written description of a pornographic movie; Liam Gillick, who has covered a ceiling with squares of Perspex; Keith Tyson, whose offerings include a monolithic pillar; and Catherine Yass, with a film of Canary Wharf from a moving crane.

Dr Howells uses acrylics to to paint during parliamentary breaks. He studied drawing at Mountain Ash Grammar School until the age of 18, then in 1965 he enrolled at Hornsey College of Art, now part of Middlesex University.

Chapman, whose collection of 34 sculptures created with his brother Jake was sold yesterday to Charles Saatchi for a reported £1 million, said of Dr Howells’s talents: “The paintings are quite nice: better than my O-level paintings.”

Alison Jacques, who represents one of the nominees, Catherine Yass, said: “He’s looked at the Cezanne school and tried to copy it. Dr Howells absolutely does not have his own vocabulary.”

In response, Dr Howells happily admitted that he was merely “your classic Sunday painter”. He said: “The worst crime of the (Turner Prize) exhibition is that it is boring. My point is not that artists should not constantly change and challenge the orthodoxy, but that this kind of art has become the orthodoxy.”

The minister may have become an artist if politics had not intervened. By 1968 he had jouned the Communist Party and renounced art as “bourgeois individualism”.

Dr Howells did find some support from an unlikely quarter. Another Charles Saatchi favourite, Marc Quinn, a conceptualist best known for filling a mould of his head with his own blood, said: “You can’t have censorship. I don’t agree with his opinion, but it’s quite refreshing that he’s candid.”

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• A vicar’s wife: ‘There is no one to fight for us’
• Every little helps at the supermarket
• Ugg or Fitflop? The battle of the boots