Gimmicks in High Places

I was reminded this week of an episode from the Netflix series The Crown. The episode, entitled Assassins, involves the elderly Winston Churchill (played by John Lithgow) sitting for a portrait commissioned by Parliament. The modernist artist charged with the portrait, Graham Sutherland, is a worts-and-all kind of artist. The painter endeavors to depict Churchill as realistically (read unflattering) as possible. The painting, finally unveiled, is hated by its subject.

Portrait of Winston Churchill, Graham Sutherland. 1954

The conclusion one can draw from this episode, is that the great statesman was unwilling to face the reality of his aged and ugly visage. Vanity, it would seem, is the main problem that a portrait painter has to contend with: John Singer Sargent famously said “Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.” The question and the hesitancy I encounter the most as a painter of portraits is “doesn’t someone have to be narcissistic to commission a portrait?” Well, no, a person who commissions a portrait wants to ensure a person's legacy, and it is understandable that person wants to be shown at their best. While vanity of the sitter is a problem for portraiture, it is the vanity of the painter which is at issue here. When a narcissistic painter tries to steal the show, a portrait ceases to be a portrait of the subject, and becomes a platform for the artist.

King Charles III, Jonathan Yeo. 2024

This week the newly crowned King Charles III unveiled his first official portrait as king. While he seemed gracious at the unveiling, the public have not been as kind. The internet, in the past few days, has been replete with opinions and silly memes. People have criticized the red toned painting as looking like the king was “burning in hell.” The anti-establishment lot started clucking with their predictable lack of creativity. One such hot-take of an eye-roller was “Could it also represent the thousands of souls slaughtered by the British Empire…?” (New York Magazine) The portrait has also been compared to the portrait of the evil tyrant in Ghostbusters 2. This is all to say that this portrait is far from flattering to the sitter. The painting, however, is a success for one person: the artist.

Jonathan Yeo’s paintings all employ a similar device; that is, the subject’s face seems to emerge from a liquid ground, said to have a haunting quality or dismissed as resembling Hans Solo frozen in carbonite. This is Yeo’s style: the most important thing for an artist like Yeo. The painting has to be immediately recognizable as one of his. His paintings might-as-well have © on them next to his signature. When Yeo was hired to paint the king the predictable outcome should have been that the style of the artist would emerge leaving the King of England in his swamp of red. While the public’s reaction reflects badly on the king, for Yeo it is a marketing dream, his style is the talk of the town.

President Barack Obama, Kehinde Wiley. 2018

Emerging from a green bush (or perhaps, like Homer Simpson, receding) we find our next example of a narcissistic artist promoting himself and his style over the task of depicting the subject of the painting. One would think that a portrait of a president should garner a little regard but, like the portrait of the king, the subject seems incidental. Barack Obama in his portrait, is as interchangeable and unimportant as one of Morandi’s bottles. Kehinde Wiley has become one of America’s most well known painters. His style is as simple as it is formulaic. A person, usually black, cut and pasted on to a two-dimensional field, a wallpaper-looking background. To ignore the racial, historical, social issues that usually accompany any discussion of these paintings, the casual viewer can identify a Wiley© at a glimpse. This recognizability is good for his brand. Uniformity and recognizability is as important for Wiley as it is for McDonalds. What this uniformity and focus on style is not good for, however, is depicting an individual. For Wiley, the person he is painting is just another element of his gimmick. The individual is just the sesame seed bun of his big Mac version of art.  

The notion of what an artist does and who he is, has changed a great deal since Rembrandt, Bronzino, Hans Holbein, and even John Singer Sargent. These portrait painters all have a distinctive way of depicting their subjects. The viewer of old master painters can tell who the author of the paintings is, but what might be called their style is simply the handwriting of their picture-making. If, in Rembrandt’s case, he wanted to add impasto, he would, but I highly doubt it was intended as a self-conscious, brand-making style like today’s artists Yeo and Wiley.

I think that the first question a portrait artist should ask himself when beginning a portrait is who is this for. If the answer is for the person being depicted, I don’t see the harm in flattering them a little bit; one doesn’t have to lie in order to make the truth look good. If the intended audience is the future, paint the person as they should be remembered: I should get a sense of who the person was, everyone’s personality can be expressed if the artist cares to show it. A portrait should never be a billboard for the person doing the painting. The portrait artist and the contemporary artist are two different things; to the contemporary artist it is most important that a painting be in service to his oeuvre. The portrait artist understands that the portrait should be a duet, not a solo. People are so interesting, even if they aren't presidents or kings. If painted well, a face has the power to fascinate a viewer for hundreds of years. The story of a face will always be more captivating than some artist’s gimmick.