Man with a Blue Scarf

On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud

Martin Gayford

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780500770788
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Lucian Freud is widely regarded as the greatest figurative painter of our time. Freud spent seven months painting a portrait of the art critic Martin Gayford and the daily narrative of their encounters takes the reader straight into the artist's studio, and to the heart of Freud's working methods, both technical and psychological.
Full of wry and revealing observations, this is a book not quite like any other: the inside story of how it feels to pose for a remarkable artist, and be transformed into a work of art.
This is not a biography, but a series of close-ups: the artist at work, and in conversation in restaurants, in taxis and in his studio. It takes one into the company of the painter for whom Picasso, Giacometti and Francis Bacon were friends.
'One of the best books about art, and the making of art, that I have ever read' - Julian Barnes. Note: The ebook edition includes the complete text of the printed book with a reduced number of illustrations.

1 December 2003

The talk is, I begin to realize, almost as much part of the sitting process as the drawing and painting. Portraiture requires observation of the subject, not just as an inert and motionless living-statue, but also moving, speaking, reacting in all manner of moods and circumstances – some characteristic of the sitter’s everyday behaviour, some more exceptional. It is precisely those movements of the eyes, mouth and the mobile topography of the face that make an image like a person, rather than a waxwork.

LF, consequently, is always observing. Indeed, engaging talker as he is, he is above all an observer of others, as his concise analysis of Ernst – Teutonic Parisian – suggests. A sure way to catch his attention is with a description of some odd, eccentric or simply distinctive behaviour by anyone, no matter whether he knows them or is ever likely to meet them. LF has something of a novelist’s sensibility as well as a painter’s omnivorous gaze.

He is also – in fact, it is part of his charm – a conversationalist rather than a monologist. That is, he is always ready to follow any subject that arises, and interested in what you have to say. Indeed, he is intensely interested in you. Obviously, this too is charming. That interest in other people is always awake in him, but is perhaps especially strong when you are the subject of a picture. We have chatted many times before, but I think I detect a heightened level of attention now that I have become raw material for a work.

It turns out to be temptingly easy to start a dialogue while LF is painting. The disadvantage is that as soon as this happens he concentrates on talking rather than painting. Therefore, the more we are diverted into conversation the more entertaining the sittings will become, but the longer the whole picture will take.

…

The portrait is a variety of art that has developed in Western art over five millennia since the age of the pyramids. Its subject is the individuality of a particular person: the sitter. So, in a sense, a portrait is all about the model. But, of course, it is also an expression of the mind, sensibility and skills of its creator: the artist. A picture of a person by Rembrandt or Velázquez reveals as much – or more – about them as it does about the seventeenth-century Dutch or Spanish person who happened to be their sitter.

Then again, perhaps the true subject of a portrait is the interchange between painter and subject – what the sitter consciously or unconsciously reveals, and the artist picks up. Out of the sittings comes, with luck, a new entity: a picture that succeeds and fails – that is, lives on in human memory or disappears – according to its power as a work of art.

…

It follows that, like other forms of observation, portraiture is a two-way activity. In the study of linguistics, there is a complication known as the ‘observer’s paradox’, which was formulated by a sociolinguist named William Labov. It states: ‘The aim of linguistic research in the community must be to find out how people talk when they are not being systematically observed; yet we can only obtain this data by systematic observation.’

The artist at work on a portrait is in a similar position. By observing me, LF is altering my behaviour. I am, in the studio, behaving slightly differently than I do anywhere else.

For the artist it is important to elicit the facial movements, glances and expressions through which in large part we recognize and communicate with each other. But to do so the artist must interact with the sitter. Thus conversation is not just a by-product of the portrait sittings, a way of passing the time and keeping the subject from sinking into a slough of boredom. Of course, it is that too, and especially useful for an artist such as LF whose way of working is so extravagantly demanding of the sitter’s time. But it is also necessary.

In 1954, a lifetime ago when I was a toddler, LF wrote some notes on his approach for Encounter magazine, which still in some ways describe what he does: ‘The subject must be kept under closest observation: if this is done, day and night, the subject – he, she, or it – will eventually reveal the all without which selection itself is not possible.’

What the much younger LF didn’t add was that this observation is ineluctably an exchange. While the artist is gathering the materials necessary for the portrait, the sitter – accidentally and automatically – is provided with a similar set of observations of the artist. By the end of this picture, I shall be in possession of a mental portrait of LF, culled from all the hours of looking at and listening to him.

…

For LF, 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 generalized, idealized or generic. He insists that the most humble and – to most people – nondescript items have their own characteristics.

Even in the case of a manufactured item, such as a shirt, he finds that one example will be slightly unlike another, a hanging thread perhaps, a different turn of the collar. A year ago, when he was painting a still life of four eggs, he discovered that on close examination each showed distinct personal traits. So the still life turned into a sort of group portrait. It follows that all Freud’s pictures of people are portraits. He likes to call his nudes ‘naked portraits’.

In his work of the late 1940s and early 1950s, this concentration on uniqueness was expressed in extraordinary levels of surface detail. His portraits of that time seem to itemize every hair on his subjects’ heads. They include such minutiae of appearance as the markings in the irises of their eyes, and individual eyelashes: details of which in normal life one is scarcely aware. This attention to detail did not mean, of course, that even then he included everything he saw. That would be a mechanical and, for an artist, unproductive way to work. He was selecting, and including what seemed relevant to the picture.

The eyes and the hair, at that stage, seemed especially to fascinate him. In terms of biology and psychology, that instinct was absolutely correct. Although it is almost impossible to produce an accurate description in words of any human face beyond generalities – brown hair, big nose, thin lips – in reality each set of human features is minutely individualized. Each is unique.

The whorls, spokes and spots of the iris – so finely drawn in LF’s works of over half a century ago, such as Man at Night (Self Portrait) (1947–48) – differ slightly in every member of the human race. Soon we will be drawing money from cash machines and strolling through border security on the basis of those patterns in our irises.

In his book The Poetics of Space (1958), the critic and philosopher Gaston Bachelard quotes the advice of a dictionary of botany: ‘Reader, study the periwinkle in detail, and you will see how detail increases an object’s stature.’ ‘To use a magnifying glass’, Bachelard comments a little later, ‘is to pay attention.’

Sixty years ago, LF seemed to paint with a magnifying glass, which was a sign of the intensity of attention he was paying to his subject. Although his work has changed enormously over the years, that hasn’t altered. The process we have embarked on is going to be, in part, a matter of focusing on apparently small matters: the fall of a lock of hair, the hang of a jacket.

Another way of paying attention to something is to expend time concentrating on it. There, LF is extravagant. He takes as long as the painting seems to require: always dozens of hours, sometimes hundreds. Human models differ from eggs and shirts in lots of ways, of course, one being that they are conscious of the passage of time. And sitting for LF takes up a great deal of that, although quite how much is unpredictable. He has been known to abandon work on a picture after months of effort, which may well be the end of the matter. Or, alternatively, he may perhaps start on it again once more after another long interval.

At the moment, LF is painting horses at a stables discovered by his assistant, the painter and photographer David Dawson, in a remote area of west London. One of the current paintings, he says, is of a horse’s body from its shoulders back to the tail, but without its neck or head. ‘It’s one of the darkest paintings I’ve done because the horse is piebald and the stable is very shadowy. It’s a sort of nude. The other, of a very old grey gelding, is a portrait.’ By that, I suppose he means, the first is a picture of the animal’s body, the second of its face.

The latter, the head of the grey gelding at the stables, is just finished – and took only twenty painting sessions, ‘which is amazingly fast’. LF seems to have been a little taken aback by the sudden and early completion of this picture. ‘But’, he says, ‘suddenly, it was quite definitely finished.’

Normally, progress is much slower. A picture of Andrew Parker Bowles in dress uniform as an officer of the Household Cavalry has already been going on for a year and a month. (LF thought it had been maybe six months, but was corrected by Parker Bowles who, as the sitter, was naturally aware of just how long it had taken.) It has now reached the zone of the subject’s feet and will carry on for a good time yet. The picture stands, waiting for the next session, in the other half of the studio.

Sometimes, as time goes on, pictures expand. A big painting of David Dawson lying naked on a bed with his dog, Eli – which is being painted at LF’s other studio in Holland Park – is currently at a workshop having an extra piece of canvas attached to make it even larger.

It remains to be seen whether this one of me is going to be a fast Freud, a slow Freud, or – a depressing thought – a Freud that is abandoned halfway through. So an incalculable interval stretches ahead before the picture is going to be finished, many months certainly. What will it be like to sit in that leather chair for hour after hour, week after week?

3 December 2003

When I arrive, LF remarks that he is feeling rough: ‘Not ill, but unusually mortal; although I think that when I make all my complaints about my health, it’s really because I expect to feel very well all the time.’ He had already spent four hours or so on the horse’s back and hindquarters in the morning, and had another long sitting with a girl who poses in the afternoon.

LF has worked standing up since a moment in Paris in the 1950s, before which he always sat down. This makes his working procedure, which may involve three sittings a day and as much as ten hours’ work, quite an arduous one for a man of very nearly eighty-one (his birthday is in five days’ time, on the eighth). LF makes green tea and we talk for a while, then we go upstairs to the studio and the sitting begins.

This is the first moment when paint will actually go on the canvas. There is, it emerges, a preliminary ritual when LF is using pigment. First, he rummages around and finds a palette, thickly encrusted with worms and gouts of dried pigment. Then he spends a considerable amount of time carefully cleaning a zone at the bottom left near the thumbhole. There follows more casting around for suitable brushes and tubes of paint that lie around in mounds on a portable trolley and on top of a cupboard near the wall. From the pile of old ragged sheets in the corner of the studio he selects a clean section, tears off a square and tucks it into his waistband, like a very informal butcher or baker.

These rags are another element in the arrangement of the studio. They lie around in piles in the corners of the room. In a couple of paintings of a decade and a half ago, two nudes of the same model entitled Standing by the Rags (1988–89) and Lying by the Rags (1989–90), they are an important part of the visual architecture, billowing like the clouds in a scene of saints in heaven by Titian or Veronese, but real. When LF lived in Paddington, at one point he lodged above a rag-and-bone shop, ‘and I discovered the rags were of great use to me’. They’ve been part of his equipment, and the furnishings of his studios, ever since.

The rag-apron is used for wiping brushes and occasionally the palette knife. The larger palette scrapings are wiped on the walls, where they radiate in areas, and on the doorframe. Blobs of pigment have been trodden into the floor and telephone numbers and cryptic words scribbled on the plaster. ‘Buddleia’, reads one. Two tall chairs, covered in a splatter of paint, do duty as extra trolleys on which LF stores a jumble of tubes. Often he carefully, though precariously, balances his palette on the back of one of these when he leaves the room.

The effect of the paint-smeared interior is very much like certain kinds of abstract painting, or – changing the metaphor – a nest which LF has slowly, almost accidentally, constructed through the routines of his work. The walls themselves, apart from the starbursts and crusting of vigorously trowelled paint, are washed in a neutral brown.

Outside the studio, up and down the stairs, little patches and speckles of stray pigment also proliferate It is a strange effect in this otherwise perfect mid-eighteenth-century house; one that LF accepts, I presume, because it humanizes – personalizes – the spaces. ‘Sometimes someone goes to the bathroom upstairs, and I quite like the way they leave traces.’

Architecturally, this studio, one of the two in which LF regularly works, is a perfect, elegant double Georgian room. It has a couple of fine original fireplaces and window frames with shutters. In the half of the room in which I sit, the part dedicated to night pictures, those shutters are permanently closed. This adds to the studio’s sense of tranquil intimacy. Outside, there is a busy street with traffic, shops, restaurants and passers-by. But behind the shutters the noise is muffled. Inside it is peaceful, secluded. There is nothing that needs to happen here except the slow progress of the picture.

Talking about work, I quote Duke Ellington’s quip, ‘I don’t need time, I need a deadline’, which more or less expresses my own experience. LF is amused, but his own attitude is the opposite. ‘When one is doing something to do with quality, even a lifetime doesn’t seem enough.’

Time is his luxury, and he is prepared to spend any amount that is necessary to get a picture right, which is another paradox, since by nature LF is packed with nervous energy and still apt, for example, to dive into traffic and sprint down the road in pursuit of a taxi. ‘All my patience’, he notes, ‘has gone into my work, leaving none for my life.’

…

Artists’ studios are highly specialized spaces, and they are all different from each other. A studio is, in a way, a particular kind of workshop. Like a kitchen, it is a room dedicated to doing a certain kind of job; in this case, not making food but producing art. And studios are at least as varied as kitchens, perhaps more so. Some are as neat and orderly as laboratories. Mondrian, living in a tiny apartment in Paris between the wars, transformed his working environment into a three-dimensional equivalent to his paintings. He lived amid a careful arrangement of square panels and vertical lines, interrupted by one cylindrical object: his bright red stove.

Francis Bacon, on the other hand, made his pictures in a midden of discarded items and detritus – champagne boxes, old Frank Sinatra LPs, magazines and newspapers containing possible source material for his work, abandoned canvases – all of which was excavated with archaeological care from his flat at 7 Reece Mews in Kensington after his death in 1992, and reassembled in the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.

LF’s studio is towards the messy, disorderly end of this scale, with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Other titles of Interest
• Contents
• 28 November 2003
• 1 December 2003
• 3 December 2003
• 5 December 2003
• 16 December 2003
• 19 December 2003
• 28 December 2003
• 2 January 2004
• 6 January 2004
• 16 January 2004
• 23 January 2004
• 26 January 2004
• 30 January 2004
• 3 February 2004
• 6 February 2004
• 11 February 2004
• 21 February 2004
• 24 February 2004
• 27 February 2004
• 3 March 2004
• 9 March 2004
• 7 April 2004
• 14 April 2004
• 16 April 2004
• 19 April 2004
• 27 April 2004
• 29 April 2004
• 4 May 2004
• 7 May 2004
• 11 May 2004
• 14 May 2004
• 18 May 2004
• 20 May 2004
• 26 May 2004
• 27 May 2004
• 15 June 2004
• 16 June 2004
• 22 June 2004
• 30 June 2004
• 4 July 2004
• Portrait Head
• Postscript
• Afterword
• Sources of Quotations
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright