“Man With a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud” by Martin Gayford

This book has been on my list for a while, I thought it was a really interesting premise and a very different perspective on art and the creation of art. It was indeed a very interesting read, although it didn’t totally hit for me for a few reasons that may or may not be fair.

The book essentially is the author’s notes on sitting for a portrait with Lucien Freud (LF). He clearly based it on his journal notes and elaborated as he went, all of the entries are dated from the early 2000s. The vast majority of the book is about sitting for this portrait, and there is a short section at the end about sitting for an engraving.

Gayford talks about how he feels sitting for the portrait, whether that’s bored or self-conscious or so on. And he talks quite a bit about LF’s philosophy and technique behind painting. LF doesn’t want to create art that is pretty or just like the sitter, he focuses more on creating a decent piece of art and subtly alters things in service of that. He also though has been known to exaggerate features that sitters are self-conscious about to make them look less pretty. Apparently one of his previous sitters said that he violated some contract between artist and model, which he then explicitly says that he always wants to do.

I thought this was a really interesting meditation on the process of creating art as well. Gayford talks about how long this all takes and complains about being there for weeks without making much progress. He sometimes asks LF about how things are going and what different colors are for. Evidently Gayford owns two different blue scarves and didn’t realize this until partway through (whoops).

I did really enjoy reading this book, but I just don’t think that LF’s art is for me. There are plenty of examples in the book, and I realized a few pages in that LF seemed to really enjoy making his models look ugly. Even before he said that in the book. And that all of the nudes emphasize the genitals which is just something I don’t particularly care for. I really like his use of color and texture, the portrait that makes the name of the book has these really nice streaks in the model/author’s face, but overall I just feel like he’s painting to an audience that isn’t me. And partially it may be that I don’t particularly care for portraiture, it has never been my favorite type of painting. But I can’t help but feel that I would in fact be more interested in some of these conversations about LF’s methods if I liked his art more.

All that to say, I am still glad that I read this book and was exposed to this art. If anything, I wish that there were more books like this so we can get a sense of how more artists work directly from their models! Could you imagine how our sense of Degas’ dancers (as a recent example of another book I read on models) would change if we knew their perspective?