AND ANOTHER THING
Useful lessons we can learn from the painting of Liz Forgan's legs
PAUL JOHNSON
Now that painters are at last returning to the representation of the real world,
instead of the splodges from their inner minds, they are finding it is far from easy. Painting people instead of splodges demands skills which are exceedingly hard
to acquire. The standard fare of Brickie art — plastering chocolate on a wall, festoon- ing lavatory paper, pouring concrete into a mould — does not reveal whether the artist has any skill at all, and all he/she needs is the stamp of approval from a Brickie big shot like Nicholas Serota. But once the painter tackles a real subject, the presence or absence of skill, experience and 'sheer, bloody, old-fashioned talent' (to quote J.B. Priestley) becomes immediately apparent to everyone. This is the first lesson to be learned from the unveiling of 'The Guardian Women' by Sarah Raphael at the National Portrait Gallery.
Group portraits are notoriously difficult. Combining likenesses, proportion and verisimilitude within a composition which doesn't make you want to laugh demands professional technique of the highest order. Rembrandt's 'Night Watch' understandably got him into trouble with his patrons and it always amazes me that the Spanish royal family put up with Goya's unconscious mickey-taking. Offhand I can think of only two portraitists who made groups seem nat- ural, the incomparable Van Dyck and the scarcely less gifted J.S. Sargent. Even Hol- bein had to struggle hard with 'The Family of Sir Thomas More'. The NPG is full of hilarious failures. Orpen, who certainly did not lack talent, had a brave try with 'Some General Officers of the Great War', but all it indicates is why we nearly lost it. Poor James Gunn, a polished workman, came a fearful cropper with his 'King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Taking Tea with the Two Princesses'.
I say all this by way of consolation to Ms Raphael, who was asked to do something beyond her powers. The proposal to por- tray Jill Tweedie before she died of motor neurone disease, surrounded by other stars of the Guardian women's page, came from Claire Tomalin, who was wise enough to stay out of it herself. It might have proved a brilliant idea, given a genius to carry it out. As it is, I am emboldened to comment by the certainty that Jill Tweedie herself would have been the first to 'go into shrieks', to use Mrs Rodd's expression, had she seen what emerged. To begin with, the
subject of the painting has subtly changed. It now ought to be called 'Liz Forgan's Legs and Associated Subjects', because the optical centre of the work is formed by the powerful and well-nourished limbs of the managing director of BBC Network Radio, who appears to be screwing up her face in horror at this undue prominence. She is crowding poor Jill up to the other end of the sofa, behind which Polly Toynbee, the BBC social affairs editor, is keeping fierce watch, handicapped by the fact that her legs appear to have been cut off just above the knees. Mary Stott, former Guardian women's editor, has opted out of the legs game by deciding to dress as Michael Foot and slump in a basket-chair almost out of the picture.
The sitter I feel most sympathy for is Posy Simmonds. This exquisite creature, the prettiest woman artist in London as well as the most accomplished, is presented as the lady from the Monster Show, with a huge, cross head on a shrunken body, her prehensile right hand reaching into a cook- ie-jar which has been placed awkwardly in front of her chair. The caricature of her is particularly unfortunate because she her- self, like Jane Austen, has an exact idea of the limitations of her talent and sticks firm- ly to her two inches of ivory: no chance of Posy getting into the high-risk group por- trait game. In her evident embarrassment she is looking fixedly above Liz Forgan's head. None of the women indeed dares look any of the others in the eye, as if in fear of collapsing in a fit of the giggles.
Beyond the ineptitude of the painting, I must confess, is the intrinsically comic con- 'The place or the war?' cept of Guardian Women, or of any group of women, particularly fiendishly clever ones, ganging up together in self-conscious sisterhood. I don't know why it is, but the image of the England women's cricket eleven sitting for their group photo is funny, whereas the men's eleven isn't and this despite the fact that, at present, the women are far more successful than the men.
It was always thus. Behind a veneer of piety, Memling and Carpaccio — two male chauvinists, I suspect, as well as witty fel- lows — had a good deal of fun with St Ursula and her Virgins. A 10th-century misreading of the abbreviated text, 'XI MV', which stood for undecim martyres vir- gines (11 martyred virgins), as undecim mil- ha virgines (11,000 virgins), led to the fan- tastic but fascinating accounts of Ursula barging all over Europe's waterways with her immense maiden army. One version has her attended not merely by 10,000 vir- gins, but by a further 60,000 serving women. Of course if you count those who read, in addition to those who write, the Guardian women's pages, you would have a grand total of 70,000 Guardian Women at least, though the imagination boggles at the thought and I doubt if many, or indeed any, would-be virgins (though a lifelong lesbian, I assume, remains virgo intacta, technically if not morally). Painting them would have driven even the bullish Carpaccio to decline the commission, and I can't see anyone, not even Hockney or Lucian Freud, taking it on today: though, come to think of it, a work entitled 'Seventy Thou- sand Screaming Guardian Women', by Francis Bacon, might have been a possibility.
The point I am leading up to, and the second lesson of Ms Raphael's picture, is that women are no longer enlarged, but diminished, by old-style sisterly solidarity. Jill Tweedie was an outstanding individual in no need of feminist scaffolding. So are all the others in the painting, not forgetting Ms Tomalin. They are high achievers in an age when for a woman to get to the top is no longer a singularity but normal. The campaign is over and won, the battlefield littered with dead white males, and Boadicea can be pensioned off. So let's scrap Guardian Women and Woman's Hour and all the other relics, put them in the Imperial Sex War Museum, and start treat- ing women as simply people.
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