THE ARTS:A portrait by Lucian Freud was destroyed recently by its subject - a millionaire who didn't like the way his chin looked in the painting. But why, since Freud paints so truthfully, hasn't this happened to his work before, asks Jonathan Jones
IT HAD to happen. He's been asking for it all his life. Lucian Freud is an obsessively truthful painter. It is literally all he seems to care about. There are no flights of fancy in his art, almost no imagination, you might say, at the risk of being misunderstood - only remorseless fact. In the history of the portrait, there have been many great, courageous and consequently unflattering paintings. But no artist who made a living primarily by portraying live people has ever been quite as systematically unkind to them.
The recent news that the millionaire antiquarian book dealer Bernard Breslauer destroyed a portrait of himself painted by Freud in the 1950s, just because he didn't like the way his chin looked, is therefore not a surprise. No - the surprise is that more people don't slash or burn the results after they sit for this inconvenient truth-teller. I bet Queen Elizabeth wishes she could get away with it.
Reports have stressed Breslauer's baldness and sagging lower face, as if this might explain his dislike of the painting. And yet, when you look at a Freud portrait, there doesn't need to be any particular blemish, or ugliness, to account for its disturbing the sitter. Imagine living with any of his paintings and comparing your actual body with his depiction of it, in those grey and salmon oils. The experience must be incredibly painful.
A couple of days ago, I happened to be looking at his 1989 painting Man in a Chair, a portrait of the 4th Baron Rothschild, in the National Portrait Gallery in London. By Freud's standards, this is not a very cruel picture. Rothschild is allowed to keep his clothes on. There is not the severe cropping that makes Freud's head of the Queen so shocking. It's quite conventional, ordinary even - but the man's flesh is so mottled and weary, his nose so shiny, his mouth such a grimly metal-and-satin orifice, his chin so wobbly. Without being especially ugly, he looks dismal: an average ruin.
Great portrait painters have always risked this kind of truth-telling. Sometimes, centuries later, the insult is clearly visible. In his portrait of Jacopo de Strada (who, like Bernard Breslauer, was a rich antiques dealer), Titian emphasises the man's hard nose and coldly glaring, almost murderous eye. His portrait of Pope Paul III depicts the old pontiff as weak, dying, perhaps senile. Even Raphael, so charming to patrons, portrayed them boldly: he captured for all time the fat gangster face of Pope Leo X.
Out of this unflattering tradition came Velazquez's meaty Pope Innocent X, which inspired Francis Bacon's popes. Yet all these disturbing portraits still exist. The sitters did not slash them, let alone destroy them.
I can't actually recall a single story in Vasari's copious Lives of the Artistsfeaturing a Renaissance portrait being destroyed by an offended sitter. Perhaps this is because it was such a precious thing, before photography, to have a great painter capture your real appearance. So you accepted the revelation of your flaws, your illness, your mortality.
In the past century, however, the status of the painted portrait has changed. Ever since Picasso portrayed Gertrude Stein with a primitive mask for a face, the artist is no longer mutually agreed to be a truth-teller. When painters in the past portrayed people's blemishes, this was understood to be the price of an accurate portrait. Modern art responded to the photographic age by declaring that painters no longer needed to do what photography could do so much more quickly; their job was to capture a more elusive emotional truth.
After he portrayed Stein as a totemic tribal figure, Picasso began to decompose appearances even more comprehensively, in cubist portraits such as Ma Jolie, whose title (My Pretty) alludes not just to the girl concealed within it, but to his provocative modern notion of what is beautiful.
Matisse had already portrayed his wife with a green stripe down her face. Were these great artists exposing hidden truths - or constructing fictions? It would be naive to think that modernist disfigurations never lie. After all, sometimes artists really do reinvent people. When Stein complained that Picasso's portrait didn't look like her, he replied: "It will."
In Britain, Winston Churchill's widow was able to justify burning Graham Sutherland's portrait of her husband as a lonely, grumpy, confused old man because Sutherland was a "modern" artist who might be imposing a fiction, a mean fantasy. In the same age, Bacon said one reason he preferred painting people, even close friends, from photographs to having them sit for him was because the results caused offence.
The destruction of the Freud portrait, which would have fetched quite a sum were it to have been sold, is destined to be as famous a case as Clementine Churchill's vandalism. If you own a painting you can do what you like to it, legally.
In this instance, this horrific waste of a work of art also serves as an insight into what makes Freud so exceptional. Here is an unpretentious artist who just paints what he sees. Quel horreur!
His art excludes anything that distracts from reality. And so his sitters seem to be caught like bugs. Breslauer, like them all, must have wondered, again and again: "Is this me? Is that all? Am I that?"
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