Art critic Martin Gayford’s new book is a journal of the year and a half that he spent regularly sitting totally still for hours on end in a chair in a gloomy room while an 82 year-old man painted and repainted his picture with painstaking slowness.
Art critic Martin Gayford’s new book is a journal of the year and a half that he spent regularly sitting totally still for hours on end in a chair in a gloomy room while an 82 year-old man painted and repainted his picture with painstaking slowness. So yep, granted; it might not sound like the most thrilling experience to publish a thorough diary about, but Man with a Blue Scarf somehow manages to transform all these weird slow hours into one of the best and most continually fascinating books about painting in recent memory. Which, it turns out, is actually kind of thrilling.
Gayford has re-routed the creative one-way street that usually runs between portraitist and portraitee, using his time with our greatest living figurative painter to conduct a kind of insanely-long informal interview about a ton of really interesting stuff. The affectionate portrait of Freud that emerges from all this is absolutely beguiling; he speaks with a lively and scathing wit about the art he loves and (even better!) loathes, about his methods and his mania for work, of his dizzyingly lofty positions in both the market and the history of art. The stuff that comes out of this guy’s mouth, it turns out, is worth almost as much as the paintings; here is a man who casually tosses off personal anecdotes about Greta Garbo, Man Ray, Orwell, Auden, Picasso and his old pal Francis Bacon, and who is consistently erudite and truly exciting to listen to.
It’s all corralled insightfully by the ever-curious eternal fanboy Gayford, and the handsome hardback edition that’s just been published also has some great David Dawson photos of Freud’s studio and the man himself at work, as well as gorgeous full-colour reprints of some of the best paintings ever knocked up. This is one of those odd books – we can’t think of anything else quite like it – that you never realised the world so needed until it arrived. So rejoice, is all: Another Good Book has arrived.
If you think you’d be into this book, here’s three more you will really like:
On the Way to Work by Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn: Our favourite book of artist interviews ever.
Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester: Damien Hirst’s favourite book of artist interviews ever.
The Late Hector Kipling by David Thewlis: Everybody's favourite recent novel about painting and art and death and all that. This is by the actor David Thewlis, and it is really pretty funny and totally good.
Stuart Hammond is the Books Editor of Dazed & Confused.
