IIt’s hard to be objective about an artist you like as a person. I recently met painter Jonathan Yeo on a radio show – whose portrait of King Charles has been unveiled to a storm of intense publicity – and I was instantly charmed. It’s easy to see why famous people enjoy being photographed by Yeo. He is intelligent, carefree, simple. We talked about the studio visit. But then I saw his works online and was disappointed. And that was before I could see this perfect royal ordinariness.
Yeo’s portrait of the king is replete with all his evil. It is technically superficial and naive. There is no insight into the king’s personality here, just a strange metaphor about an emperor butterfly which Yeo says symbolizes his transformation from prince to king.
Nice flattery. So it’s no surprise that King Charles is pleased with his first official portrait since his coronation. As he bravely battles cancer, who could begrudge the joy this bright red tribute to aging King Charles brings? But when Charles’s red military uniform blends with the psychedelic glow of pink the pleasant effect of joy and upliftment is bought at the expense of any real artistic sense or purpose.
Yeo’s art is formulaic and it follows formula. Then he makes a pedantic study of someone’s features – boldly! – This static illustration collides with a free explosion of lurid abstract wallpapers. They featured Cara Delevingne in a hazy sabaqua setting and Taron Egerton in purple and pink rain. To me this is theft of genuine depiction based on intense, hard observation.
Royalists would never want paintings that looked too closely at their statues. Only one great artist has been allowed to approach the royal head in recent times: Lucian Freud’s searing, brutally honest portrait of Queen Elizabeth II will never be liked by sentimentalists because it reduces the royal persona to just another person. Dare to believe in form. And to be fair, Yeo views Charles the same way he views everyone else – with indifference. I will say that the depiction of his kind face adds nothing to what we see of Charles in photographs and TV images, except that it is not fair to photographers and camera people, who are often at odds with reality. Captures awkward, complex moments in royal interactions. Even respectable coverage of the accession gave us delightful glimpses of Charles’s wrath from the pen.
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It’s tempting to laugh at this painting, but it’s also a little sad if you care about art. Yeo seems to be saying that the painting itself is just a delightful bit of artificiality and glitz. Who cares about truth when you can be pretty? A serious portrait would look hard and long on Charles (or anyone), not combining innocuous camouflage with the happy serotonin of random color. We all know King is more complicated than that. The King knows he is more complicated than that. It’s a masterpiece of shallowness from an artist so ridiculous he should be called Jonathan Yow!
