Painting still counts
Martin Gayford on the controversy surrounding Lucian Freud's portrait of the Queen
W
ell, who says painting is dead? Just before Christmas — you can. I hope, still cast your mind back over the festive watershed — there was a great deal of fuss over the portrait Lucian Freud has recently completed of Her Majesty the Queen. There were several points about that brouhaha which are worth noting — not least of which is that this little picture, nine inches by six, received more publicity than any single new work in the history of art.
No Picasso, no Pollock, no Matisse has thus dominated the front pages of virtually every single national newspaper in the way that this Freud did — and it continued to generate columns, editorials, cartoons and letters for several days after its initial appearance. Not Martin Creed's empty room, not Damien's shark, not even Tracey Emin's slept-in bed aroused nearly as much interest and controversy as this image, considerably smaller than a sheet of A4. It is a startling confirmation of the cultural importance we continue to assign to painting.
Admittedly, it also suggests the fascination we still feel for monarchy. The compelling conjunction was the combination of Freud — by general acknowledgement the greatest living portrait painter — and the Queen. These are both individuals who exercise considerable fascination. Her Majesty, of course, does so more widely; but there are probably quite a few people in the arts and media world who feel, as someone put it to me at a Christmas party, that 'Lucian Freud is really much grander than the Queen'.
Almost any painted image of the monarch is automatically controversial, usually for the reasons that are as old as court portraiture — someone feels it is insufficiently flattering. A portrait of the sovereign by Freud — whose work is famous for its power apparently to remove the veil of convention from our view of any individual, revealing the truths, uncomfortable and profound, beneath — was destined to excite ten times more controversy than previous portrayals.
But this media hubbub — of which the Sun's headline 'A Travesty, Your Majesty' was the most succinct, if perhaps also the most wrong-headed manifestation — was still evidence that, deep down, we think painting matters. Or at least, that a portrait by a great painter of a person of historic significance is an important affair. It may fix his or her appearance for all time. (When people complained that Gertrude Stein did not resemble his portrait of her, Picasso replied, 'She will'; and she certainly does now, as one seldom sees any other image of her.) Even more remarkable was that the vast acreage of newsprint, the buzzing of the airwaves, the maelstrom of comment whether caustic, acute, outraged, smart Alecy, or sensible — all this was all inspired by a picture that almost no one has seen. The royal portrait by Lucian Freud that made its debut on 21 December was a virtual image, a photographic ghost.
What is more, although all the newspaper reproductions were derived from copies of a single transparency, they all looked completely different. These days everyone knows that the camera can lie, indeed with the benefit of digital technology it does so more often than not. Even so, many people are strangely trusting of newspaper reproductions of art. In fact all photographic representations of painting misrepresent the original — in scale, colour and texture — and none more than those in newspapers.
Inspection of the press of 21 December proved the point. Of the broadsheets, the Independent's was misleadingly cropped, the Telegraph's was very dark, the Times's was light. The best, in the artist's opinion, was the Guardian's. But even the transparency, taken by his usual photographer — which he thought very good — had missed out something Freud felt he had 'put into her expression'. I thought that too.
In my own column on the subject in the Telegraph I described Freud's Elizabeth II as looking — among other things — 'jovial'. This did not agree at all with the general response, of which the Evening Standard's 'Queen Grumpy' was representative. Nor did it correspond to the generally stony-faced royal visages in the press. Did I imagine the twinkle, the air of being about to grin that I thought I saw in the original? Was it present a few weeks before completion — when I saw the picture in progress — and had it evaporated from the completed work?
At this stage it is hard to be sure — although of one thing I am certain, which is that a great deal of the power of this small portrait comes from its almost miniature scale, its sense of a forceful personality bursting out of a small space. We shall all have to wait now until May to see it, when it will make a public appearance in Royal Treasures: A Golden Jubilee Celebration at the Queen's Gallery (22 May to January 2003). Because the lesson of this paperback-sized picture is not only that painting still counts, but also that there is still no substitute for seeing it in the original.
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