Man under the Microscope

The moment I finished my perusal of Man with a Blue Scarf by Martin Gayford my first reaction was that it should be made compulsory reading for anyone asked to adjudicate in future on Australia’s annual Archibald Prize. For what Gayford describes in considerable detail is the prolonged process of sitting for a portrait by the man considered by many to be the world’s pre-eminent living artist, Lucian Freud. The book thus goes a long way towards explaining what outstanding portraiture is really about.

Freud is a relentless and fastidious practitioner whose purpose is to reveal the inner as well as outer man—or woman, of course—through the extreme exactitude of his observations. The honesty as well as integrity of the process is therefore paramount.

Gayford is an English art critic who also writes with some authority on jazz. I have not always been in agreement with some of his views about the practice of art but am pleased to concede that in this instance he has largely excelled himself.

Access to Lucian Freud, who is an intensely private as well as busy man, is granted to few, and Gayford clearly relishes the kudos as well as the series of insights sitting for him has provided.

I have been asked to sit myself for portraits by somewhat less eminent English artists and can confirm that what Gayford writes, often humorously, about endless hours of sitting is essentially true. What on earth do you think about while doing your utmost to sit still?

Apparently Freud often mutters to himself while painting, rather in the manner made famous by the late Glenn Gould when playing Bach on a piano. The point of such muttering is perhaps the degree of concentration and lack of self-consciousness shown because of the total self-absorption in the business of making art.

Painting undoubtedly provides Freud, who is now in his late eighties, with almost his entire purpose in life. Gayford writes: “I have long been convinced that Lucian Freud is the real thing: a truly great painter living among us”—a view with which I concur. But it is also Gayford’s opinion that:

Great British painters, one might say, imitate the proverbial behaviour of buses. None come along for a century or more, then two at the same time. In the decades after 1800 there were J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, then none of international consequence, except perhaps Walter Sickert, until Bacon and Freud after the Second World War.

I feel such a view is unduly dismissive of the claims and career of Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) who made an extraordinary and unique contribution to British art both before and after the Second World War. What Gayford is implying, I suggest, is that Spencer is less “obviously” international than Francis Bacon, whose existentialist views and sado-masochistic theatricality may be more to the liking admittedly of international art-world cognoscenti than, say, Spencer’s deeply idiosyncratic images of graveyard resurrections. Yet I would argue here that Spencer’s vision was more truly universal—because Christian and metaphysical—rather than “merely” international in a fashionable sense. When Bacon first emerged nationally and internationally he often showed himself to be quite an unskilled and obviously clumsy painter—criticisms which could never have been applied to Spencer. But I digress.

Because, like Bacon, he was largely untrained, Freud is sometimes an extremely awkward painter also and one who often succeeds where he does—which is by no means always—by a process of unrelenting attrition. The latter trait is admirable, yet is by no means the sole virtue in art even though, I suspect, Freud might often wish it to be so. Because of the awe in which he is generally held and the debilitated nature of most contemporary criticism Freud is thus allowed to confuse what is often sheer awkwardness with a kind of “superior” authenticity.

About Freud, Gayford nevertheless writes truly:

For Lucian Freud, everything he depicts is a portrait. His peculiarity in the history of art is that he is aware of the individuality of absolutely everything. He has a completely un-Platonic sensibility, to put it in philosophical terms. In his work, nothing is generalised, idealised or generic. He insists that the most humble and—to most people—nondescript items have their own characteristics.

In the earlier part of his career, Freud painted in a more detailed manner, which at least some of his more important admirers—such as Kenneth Clark—preferred. Clark apparently considered the change Freud had made “brave” but catastrophic—a point which will confirm to some the fallibility of certain of Clark’s judgements.

That transition involved a change of methods as well as materials, notably a switch from the softness of sable brushes to the comparative coarseness of ones made from hogs’ hair. The metamorphosis, as Gayford points out, was from being a largely linear artist to being a painterly one.

Regrettably, in spite of the great interest of much of the detail he provides, Gayford seems at times to have little grasp of the sweep of art history, so his book can sometimes be grossly misleading in a manner no responsible editor should ever have allowed. Try this:

He [Freud] arrived on the scene long after Marcel Duchamp had pioneered art based on found and altered objects, rather than painting and drawing. Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were all much older than him. He worked in the era of pop art, op art, land art, performance art and many another avant-garde movement.

Gayford mentions four abstract artists here who were born, respectively, in 1872, 1866, 1912 and 1903 whereas Freud himself was born in 1922. Kandinsky was thus fifty-six years older than Freud while Pollock was merely ten years his senior. “Much older” is thus clearly used here as a highly elastic term. From a critic who has written regularly for well-regarded British newspapers such laxity is unacceptable.

In fact, Freud began his postwar career during nearly two decades when the influence of abstract expressionism—as exemplified by such as Pollock and Rothko—largely dominated Western art. Figurative painting as exemplified by Freud was thus totally contrary to mainstream Western practice even within the discipline of painting itself.

Pop art, op art, land art and performance art were relatively short-lived as fashionable international movements. Gayford somehow omits mention altogether of the movement which has gained such international dominance since the late 1960s: conceptual art. I can but pray he is somewhat more accurate historically when writing about jazz.

Where Gayford comes into his own is providing day-to-day detail that covered the eight-month duration of his regular sittings. Freud is by turns highly interesting and amusing in providing details of his early life before coming to England and in his waspish recollections about his wartime companions who seem often to have been drawn from the criminal low-life of London.

Freud is rightly obsessive that his sitter should maintain precisely the same pose and wear exactly the same clothes whatever the season. From memories of my own I recall the discomfort of being compelled to wear the same heavy wool suit, in which I began months of sittings, during the heat of July in London. As a result I often struggled to stay awake.

Gayford seems to have been a worthier and more conscientious sitter than I and was careful always to be punctual. Freud, who is a private man, clearly took him into his confidence and that is what creates the real interest of this book.

The Australian artist John Olsen first alerted me to the availability here of Gayford’s book and was fascinated himself by the strangeness of Freud’s working methods. Thus Freud virtually completed parts of Gayford’s face in sections. “How on earth does he know what he is doing without an overall sketch?” John asked me—a question to which I have no sensible answer.

Even at his age, Freud’s powers of observation are seemingly legendary. When Gayford wore the wrong one of a pair of seemingly identical blue scarves inadvertently, Freud spotted this immediately. Freud is equally obsessive about his pigments: when authorities threatened to withdraw a particularly poisonous lead-based white which Freud especially favoured, he bought up all remaining stocks of the pigment. The withdrawal of pigments on grounds of safety is still a major source of frustration to leading artists worldwide. As a well-known Australian artist remarked to me recently: “Do they think we eat the f***ing stuff?”

Gayford’s book provides an invaluable guide to the terra incognita—so far as the general public is concerned—of an important artist’s everyday life. Thus we learn not only what Freud reads and eats but also the precise reasons for his choices.

Yet clearly the real strength of the book is in the insights it provides into how its subject thinks and how he creates his singular and enduring art. Minor cavils aside, that is what makes Gayford’s book such a rare and welcome discovery.

Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud,

by Martin Gayford;

Thames & Hudson, 2010, 242 pages, $49.95.