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

The average rating for Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-12-23 00:00:00 Geoffrey Stagg A friend of mine popped in to see me at work last week and asked which were the best books I'd read this year. He is one of the very few people I actually know in real life who reads my reviews. Since I tend to give everything 5 stars, asking me which books I would actually recommend to read isn't such a bad idea once I've had time for the books to settle a bit. That said, and given I've finished this book far too quickly, This has quickly become one of the best books I've read in years and one I wish I'd read before I'd made my recommendations to him. When I was doing a course as part of my undergraduate degree which even at the time I thought was pretentiously titled innovations in fiction writing (when it was more or less a creative writing course) there was a woman, maybe 20 years older than me, who wrote a story about her passion other than writing short fiction - which was life drawing. After we had read the story - in which there was, inevitably enough, I guess, both nudity and sex - and had discussed it as a group, she outed herself as the author and said the only part of the story that was literally true was her life drawing part, and that if anyone was interested in posing for her… I've always known I'm not particularly attractive, and so the idea of posing for someone would be impossible. That said, the woman who got me to join Good Reads many years ago said once about some of my writing that I was one of the most naked writers she knew - something I took as the highest of praise. The person who bought this book for me has the initials LF - and the whole way through Gayford refers to Lucian Freud by his initials. An otherwise meaningless coincidence, that I struggled to shrug off as such. The idea behind this book is rather simple - an art writer is going to have his portrait painted by someone who was one of the greatest living portrait painters. The book is a diary of sorts, it documents his sittings, although at the start he says he has compressed some of the events into dates and so on - I suspect he has done this to match in his words on the page LF saying that likeness is the least important point of a portrait. In a sense this book is a portrait of the painter doing a portrait of the author. Since a portrait is likely to say as much about the artist as it does about the subject, we are about to walk into a pretty damn interesting hall of mirrors. Along the way there are some fantastic observations about the nature of portraiture and about the nature of art. This is a seriously good book. It was a joy to read, a total bloody joy. I feel in love with it from about 5 pages in and it held me throughout. Once I went to a local fate where a life drawing school were doing lightning fast portraits of random people strolling past. These people were asked to stand in front of half a dozen or so painters who would spend 5 minutes doing a portrait. This is one of those that was done of me. I've always thought it makes me look like a Latin American dictator. Which is, oddly enough, not particularly how I generally think of myself. I spent a lot of this book wondering how LF made his money. Towards the end it became clear that this was by selling his paintings. But it also seems that between the ages of 40 and 60 his work appears to have become quite out of fashion. At this time, it seems he turned to gambling. Now, I wouldn't have thought gambling would be the most obvious or sure-fire way to fix your money troubles. Perhaps that says more about me than it does about him. I guess he must have been already well enough off for money issues to not really be something that would distract him from his 'passion'. Half his luck, obviously. As I was reading I decided it might be nice to spend the day at the National Gallery of Victoria. In between reading, I wandered around looking at the portraits and became a bit obsessed with how the people in them almost invariably looked quite smug. One of the things that is said early on in the book is that for much of the history of portraiture the person looking out at you is also the person who paid the bills for the painter. So, portrait painting has a long history of an artist being someone who can guess how the person paying for the painting would like to be seen. If that is the case, you have to say that people, for a very long time, seem to have liked the idea of having themselves shown looking rather self-satisfied. LF was a remarkably slow painter - but I suspect this had to do with a whole range of things. Not the least that he had more in common with his famous grandfather than might otherwise be immediately apparent. Repeatedly throughout this it is clear that his observations for the painting are not merely those where he is in his studio with a brush in his hand. His manner of painting clearly involved him needing to like the person he was painting, or at least to find them interesting enough to chat with for upwards of 100 hours. My LF also does life drawing - although I can see a likeness in some of the drawings she has done of me, often I'm not quite sure. She tells me off. Apparently, I'm a poor sitter - one who moves too much. There is something very strange involved in being looked at intensely for a long period of time. I've fallen in love with people and, at least in the early phase of what that means, tried to drink in every detail of them. This has sometimes resulted in me being asked to stop doing that. It was easier with my daughters, when they were first born - it is the part of becoming a parent that no one ever really says to you, but you get to stare and stare at your child in a way it would be odd to do ever with anyone else. In fact, that kind of close observation is very unusual - it can even feel threatening, it can fill us with fear or erotic charge - flight, fight or fuck. LF notices things about his subjects that you might not want to have noticed. The least of it is the paunch you have been sucking in when you remember or your jowls. He says to the author that he is hard to paint because his mood changes so frequently and that each day it is a bit like having to paint a different person. And these changes become fascinating as the painting goes on. Should you get a hair cut? Are you sitting in the exact same spot you were last time? Are the hairs in your ears in need of a good trim, and should you mention that to LF - because, one of the things LF makes very clear is that if you mention something you would like him to hide, he is just as likely to exaggerate it. Like a poor, ugly man who later put his foot through his own portrait, an what became expensive waste of time and money after he implied LF should be making him look good in this portrait. LF makes it very clear that none of us are really beautiful and none of us are really ugly, but that our personalities bring this to the fore. I like this idea, even if I don't fully believe it. I know some of us are pretty attractive even if we are boring as bat shit and dull as dishwater. And other of us can have the most delightfully fascinating personalities, and that still not really be enough to make us physically attractive. This book reminded me a lot of The Sight of Death - the other book about a painting that I loved to bits. I can't recommend this book too highly. Some quotes: "On Dante Gabriel Rossetti: 'He's the worst of the Pre-Raphaelites, his work seems the nearest painting can get to bad breath'." p.52 "What LF means by pictures 'rhyming' is a graceful flow of forms, each interlocking or echoing another." p.56 After bringing some English sailors to a restaurant in Marseilles to try some 'cuisine au beurre'. "The thing is, Lu, we don't like food with all them flavours in it". p.76 "With bad painters all their pictures look like self portraits, except the actual self portraits" p.81 "Goya is one of the most mysterious of painters. For me, his prints and graphic works are enormously more interesting than his paintings. But all his work is filled, as so much great art is, with a sort of jokiness. You find the same thing in Ingres, in Courbet, in anyone who is marvellous. Their work is filled with jokes." p.88 "I think a lot of my sitters are girls who have some sort of hole in their lives that is filled by posing for an artist. I think it also helps if in some way, no matter how nervously, they are pleased with themselves, with their physical appearance." p.113 'You look different every day'. 'More than most people?' 'More than almost anyone I've ever encountered. The features don't change, it's more the way they are worn.' p.136 "David Hockey puts it like this, the painting by him by LF has over a hundred hours 'layered into it', and with them innumerable visual sensations and thoughts.' p.145 "Once again, for him quality in art is inextricably bound up with emotional honesty and truthfulness'. p.147 "'Rot them for a couple of rogues. They have everyone's face but their own'. "Although the range of LF's sitters is vast, there are few, if any, pictures of actors. The closest he has come is fashion models." p.168 "This is an interesting demonstration of the effect the physical space of the studio has on the works that are made in it." p.178 "Never having looked at myself before with this level of intensity and in such detail and through the objective eye of another, I am at first puzzled by what I see." p.183

Review # 2 was written on 2010-12-08 00:00:00 Mervin Kreider The eyes appear first. Then the eyebrows. They tell us more than anything. The nose will grow organically. We may have to shrink the head a bit. Let's talk. Eat. And drink. Days. Hours. Minutes. Sometimes just staring. Not provocatively, as in a bar. But trying to see the layers, the dimensions. And transpose them. Months. A sitter and an artist. Sitting is a pleasure, an ordeal, and also a worry. This is a wonderful, gorgeous book. Gayford, an art critic, sits for a portrait by Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund and a vibrant octogenarian. Freud's paintings are here and beautifully reproduced. In particular, the self-portraits are revealing, perhaps the equal of (dare I say it) a certain Dutch master. There is also a friendship between sitter and painter, which allows Freud to expound on other artists, subjects and the artist's unique worldview. But this is fundamentally a book about two things. First, it tells about the unique symbiosis between artist and subject. There is surprisingly much that the sitter does, or at least there's plenty of time for an observant soul to ponder. But this is also the story of a painting. I really felt a part of the creation. And it's a wonderful painting. A half-smile, unruly hair, searching eyes. As Gayford sees it: It's me looking at him, looking at me. And he's right. A wonderful point the author makes is that all created art must necessarily have part of the artist (writer, painter) inside it. So, Gayford says, this book is a bit of a self-portrait. And he's right there too. Here, you can learn about all the muscles in the human face and what they accomplish and whether Da Vinci or Van Gogh was the greater artist. And you will never see, in the index of any book, a cooler entry than this one: eggs, personality of