Edwin Mullins, writer, broadcaster and filmmaker who befriended many great 20th-century artists

His film about pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela led to a letter from Mary Whitehouse telling him he was ‘a light unto the nation’

Edwin Mullins, who has died aged 90, was an art critic, novelist, radio and television presenter, documentary film-maker, and author of books about artists including Georges Braque, Alfred Wallis, Elisabeth Frink, Salvador Dalí and Vincent Van Gogh.
The launchpad for his career was The Sunday Telegraph, where he was art critic during the 1960s, also writing for the Telegraph’s new colour supplement, where he worked from 1964 to 1986 (for the last 10 years it was called the Sunday Telegraph magazine). Travelling the world, Mullins waded knee-high through flood waters to cover the 1966 floods in Florence, and became friends with some of the great artists of the 20th century.
In Swimming with Dalí (2016) he recalled being invited in 1964 to the artist’s home on the Costa Brava: “A door was flung open and a figure advanced towards me, the unmistakable moustache striking upwards in the direction of two ferociously staring eyes. 
He was wearing a sky-blue jacket embroidered with sequins, a conical red hat, and a blue blob was planted on his nose. ‘Dalí!’ he announced, coming to a halt and staring straight at me. Then he added more solemnly – ‘In summer I am Hermes as Harlequin.’”
Mullins struck up a lifelong friendship with the sculptor Barbara Hepworth and was flattered in 1971 when she invited him to go to a dance hall in St Ives where much of her work was stored and choose something he might like: “I had often dreamed of owning one of Barbara’s small slate carvings or perhaps a bronze table sculpture; but knew I could almost certainly never afford it. Now maybe it could become a reality. I stepped inside.
“As I gazed around the large, gaunt building I began to feel smaller and smaller by the minute. Every bronze, every carving in wood and stone was enormous… I was Gulliver in the land of giants… I tried to work out what I should do.
“As it was I procrastinated. I was overwhelmed, I said, and would like to think about it. Barbara nodded, and said nothing. The next day came… each time I edged the conversation in [the direction of her offer] she deflected it elsewhere. It was as if yesterday had never existed, or had been airbrushed away. And so it continued; the subject became forbidden territory.”
A meeting with the art collector Peggy Guggenheim at the Tate Gallery led to Mullins visiting her at her palazzo in Venice where a bronze statue of a horse and rider by the Italian sculptor Marino Marini was set on an open terrace overlooking the Grand Canal: “The horseman had flung his arms outwards in a gesture of ecstasy and his face wore an expression of joy, which was startlingly matched by his naked penis in full erection.”
Its owner explained matter of factly that she had bought the statue from Marini when it had been in plaster, so he agreed to cast it in bronze for her, suggesting that he cast the penis separately. “That was thoughtful of him,” she went on, “because he insisted on setting it here in full view of the Grand Canal. 
“So, when the Patriarch of Venice passes by in his state barge, or a party of young nuns are on their way to be blessed in San Marco, I can remove it… I keep it in a drawer… though sometimes I forget. Their reactions always amuse me. Not at all what you might expect. The Sisters of the Immaculate Conception are the worst.”
As well as his work for the Telegraph, Mullins freelanced for other publications, chaired Critics’ Forum and Kaleidoscope on the radio, and became familiar to television viewers as the deviser and presenter of 100 Great Paintings (BBC Two, 1980), his selection ranging from Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus and Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire to Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion and Georg Baselitz’s Allegory of Art.
The series was internationally acclaimed, though the famously waspish Brian Sewell ridiculed his choice of Georges de La Tour’s Fortune Teller, asserting that it was a forgery. The Times’s gleeful headline read “Ninety-nine Great Paintings and One Great Fake”, giving the painting’s owner, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, an attack of the vapours.
The BBC gave Mullins the chance to investigate, and much to the relief of the museum he was able to prove the picture’s authenticity. Fake?, a BBC film of his investigation, was shown two years ago at the Barnes Bookfest.
Mullins’s other work for the BBC included The Pilgrimage of Everyman (BBC Two, 1973) in which he was seen following some of the historic pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela, and he went on to publish Pilgrimage to Santiago (1974, reissued 2001), a classic narrative account. The television documentary won him an encomium from Mary Whitehouse who wrote to tell him he was a “light unto the nation”. The letter hung in his downstairs lavatory for many years.
The youngest of three children, Edwin Brandt Mullins was born on September 14 1933 to Claud Mullins, a lawyer, and his wife Gwendolen, a patron of the arts. Brought up in Epsom in a house with a large garden, he developed passions for gardening, cricket and birds, and recalled, during the war, vying with friends to identify enemy aircraft passing overhead.
After the war he was dispatched to Oundle but so hated the school that he was removed and sent to Midhurst Grammar School, where he flourished.
When he was 16, his parents sent him to stay with a family in Paris to perfect his French. In reality the family pushed him out of the house every morning and left him to his own devices. As a result he was able to explore the city and fall in love with French culture.
Later, with his friend Jean Fanchette, a French poet, he would establish Two Cities, a short-lived literary magazine published in both London and Paris, to which they managed to cajole contributions from such figures as William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller and Lawrence Durrell.
Mullins won a scholarship to read English at Merton College, Oxford, where he went up after National Service in the Army and where he made many lifelong friends. After graduation and a year as London editor of Two Cities he took a job with the Illustrated London News. 
Tasked with interviewing members of the Establishment, he had the bright idea of employing an artist to make sketches of his interviewees. One of his subjects was the then Secretary of State for War, John Profumo; the artist was the society osteopath Stephen Ward.
Mullins went on to become the magazine’s art correspondent before moving to The Sunday Telegraph in 1962. His other work for television included A Love Affair with Nature (Channel 4, 1985) about the great tradition of English landscape painting, and Paradise on Earth (Channel 4, 1989), both of which were turned into books. He also published several novels.
In 1960 he married Gillian Brydone, a fellow student at Oxford, with whom he had two daughters and a son. She died of cancer in 1982 and in 1984 he married Anne Kelleher.
As his children left home he and Anne moved to Barnes and bought a village house in Provence where they spent three or four months every year for nearly 16 years. Travelling around with his golden retriever Star, he researched and published several well-received books on the area.
Edwin Mullins is survived by Anne and by his two daughters. His son predeceased him.
Edwin Mullins, born September 14 1933, died January 22 2024