Jonathan Yeo: The Schizophrenic Neo-Society Painter

On Thursday 19^th September 2013, Carol and I watched a documentary on Jonathan Yeo who was incredibly being given an exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery in London. I frankly seethed with contempt for Yeo’s illustrative and mannered kitsch portraits. I noticed, that almost as an aside, we saw Yeo take photographs of his sitters even though he then went on to make a show of painting them from life. Yet his finished work looked more the product of the camera than real study from life. Carol pointedly compared Yeo’s style to the illustrations in Woman’s Way in the 1980’s. I thought his paintings said virtually nothing about Yeo’s sitters and the only thing they said about Yeo was his taste in illustrative artists which he pastiched. There was no there - there, in Yeo’s work which was superficial and devoid of spirit. I found his rendering of faces boring and lacking any real psychological depth and his scrubbed and splattered backgrounds offensively mannered. Another small, technical, studio related reason I hated Yeo, was my disgust at his affected piling up dirty cakes of half-dry oil paint on his dirty pallet – the kind of stupid, wasteful thing - only a painter with no sense of the cost or value of oil paint would do.                              

I had seen countless artists on deviantart as technically skilled and intellectually bankrupt - but I supposed they did not have Yeo’s easy entrée into high-society or gift for self-publicity. Like so many successful people, he was apparently easy to get along with, apolitical and happy to provide the rich with a glamorous lie about themselves. I wondered what it said about art and society in 2013 that the most successful portrait artist in Britain, was in the mould of the style over substance Giovanni Boldini from the tail end of the Belle Epoch a hundred years before.                                                                                    

As with late salon portrait painters like Giovanni Boldini and Antonio Mancini, I noticed that there was a dramatic discontinuity between Yeo’s faces and backgrounds – a schizophrenic schism between illustrative portrait conventions and attempts to be fashionably painterly in the areas around the face. This may seem like a minor issue but from the first time I saw Antonio Mancini’s portraits in The Hugh Lane Museum in the mid-80s - it was an issue I had thought about a lot. I found the difference between Mancini’s heavily impastoed - almost expressionistic backgrounds - and his more conventionally naturalistic face painting - odd and not fully convincing. Even though I liked Mancini’s work, I thought he had failed to reinvent the whole surface of the picture in the radical way that Cézanne had and thus it gave Mancini’s work a schizophrenic look - torn between the traditional past and the expressive future. As for Boldini, this schism between figure and ground, had led him to use bold gestural brushstrokes in the areas surrounding the figure - that suggested proto-futurism or even proto-Abstract-Expressionism but unlike de Kooning, Boldini did not go on to deconstruct the figure. Instead, Boldini rendered the faces of his society sitters, in a perfectly modelled naturalistic way that would have been acceptable to any academic hack.                                     

A hundred years later, Jonathan Yeo, painted faces in either an uninspired blended manner that was merely a pastiche of nineteenth century academic technique or painted them in a schematic and soulless pastiche of Lucien Freud’s method of building up form through a broken patchwork of brushstrokes. But Yeo painted these conventional faces on top of an artily scrubbed background that suggested nth generation Abstract Expressionism. So like his early twentieth century counterparts, Yeo’s work was a dishonest confection of styles whose instant success - was testament to its essentially kitsch character. The inherently theatrical nature of Yeo’s work was highlighted by his sitter’s love of dressing up and presenting themselves has ham actors - inventing their own media personas. Thus Yeo’s work was lie impacted upon lie to create a glamorous illusion that simply did not convince.                                                                                        

A couple of weeks later I saw Parkinson Meets Jonathan Yeo on Sky Arts, which I watched with the relish of a critic. I thought Yeo’s porno collage of George Bush gimmicky and typically neutered like most artistic attempts to appropriate porn. It also galled me to think, I had collaged porn into my paintings decades before Yeo - and had just got abuse - not the middle-class tittering that greeted Yeo’s wannabe bad boy posturing. As for Yeo’s paintings about plastic surgery (where Yeo had painted in the marks made by plastic surgeons before operating) they simply reminded me of poor imitations of Jenny Saville’s far superior work decades before. As I watched Parkinson’s banal, middle-brow, television show, without a shred of intellectual weight, I realized that another part of Yeo’s success was his shameless desire to be loved by such an audience and convince them that he really was up there with artists like Picasso and Sargent - and at the cutting edge of contemporary art.                                

Philip Tracey and Howard Hodgkin 2006

At the end of the month I went with Carol to see When Philip Met Isabelle at the Collins Barracks Museum of Decorative arts, in had previously been on shown in the British Design Museum in London. Carol had suggested we go along to see it and I had agreed but with little enthusiasm. But what a show! It was absolutely brilliant! Isabelle Blow was a real throw back to the English eccentrics of the 1920s crossed with the avant-garde of the Brit art scene and punk. She discovered Tracey when he was studying in London and became his muse. Isabelle had Tracey move into the basement of her Belgravia house and made his name in London. Their hilarious story was the stuff of myth and every art student's dream. She had a passion for hats and the courage to wear the most outlandish creations Tracey could conceive. Together they made art - there is no finer way to put it. The exhibition was superbly staged - the all black walls adding super glamour to the whole affair. The hats inspired by flowers, shells, modernist sculptures and paintings, were at once hilarious and deadly serious - truly eccentric! The hats were objects of supreme craftsmanship and attention to detail combined with zany wit and a desire never to repeat the same design twice - a rebuke to so much so called 'art' of my day that failed to achieve any of the aforementioned. Leaving the exhibition my girlfriend I were giddy with life, thankful that such original minds and persona's can exist in the midst of the dreck of a tediously multi-national, pop culture world.                                                                     

Later after a Mocha and delicious sticky toffee pudding we went to IMMA where I wanted to see the paintings of Howard Hodgkin. As usual I.M.M.A served up a mixed bag of exhibitions of varying degrees of quality. First we looked around Abstraction x 3 a group show featuring the work of Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin. It was claimed that their work “...developed artistic means for expressing, diagramming and understanding philosophical, scientific and transcendental ideas.” Such was the bullshit of contemporary art speak and it meant absolutely nothing. Inspecting the work gave no idea of such lofty ideals being met in plastic language. Instead, one saw tedious spirograph like abstractions by Emma Kunz and utterly pointless graphed white abstractions by Agnes Martin. That work that was so utterly useless as explanations for philosophical and relativity ideas could be passed off as such just showed the cretins and self absorbed solipsism of the art world at its worst. But the real crime was that as art works they were so dull, unskilled and boring. After all Mondrian and Kandinsky believed a lot of Theosophical mumbo-jumbo - but they also made plastic works of great beauty, colour and order.                                                                                                                          


The next exhibition we saw was Orla Barry's Portable Stones. Barry was a contemporary of mine. But unlike her I had not been offered bursary's, awards, residencies and countless exhibitions in Dublin and London. I was crippled by an ability to draw and paint, to think outside of the academic conceptual box and had a desire to make images that dealt with real meaty issues. Barry's work read like an earnest teenager who has a MFA and decided to bequeath to the world the weight and depth of her linguistic genius. The fact that her aphorisms were so utterly banal, so utterly contrived and so utterly irrelevant had meant that to those in the art world she was seen as highly significant and worthy of exhibition after exhibition. In my studio I had 51 notebooks crammed full of one liners and thoughts on the world, sometimes they made it into a painting or drawing, mostly I reserved such mental masturbation to my private life. But even if I did as Orla did, mechanically fill canvas after canvas with them, they would not have been shown, because they were filled with hate, originality and despair - nothing that could be politely contained in the Irish art world.                             

  
After the dross of Barry's work, we viewed the exhibition of drawings in the permanent collection. Many of the works were of dubious merit. One dismal and limp pencil drawing of a woman's head by Matisse stood out because if it were not for the name behind it this doodle would not stand up to anybody's judgment. Matisse I thought was a very over rated draftsman, but he had done so much better than this! However, there were some very strong drawings of poor Brazilian children by Brian Maguire, pencil drawings of Oak leaves by Tom Molloy, Satirical Post-Modern drawings by David Godbold, lithographs by Terry Winters, and a kitsch but beautiful permanent marker drawing on linoleum by Stephen Brandes.   

                                                                          
  
Once again, the seesaw of quality swung as we viewed the video work Silver Bridge by Jacky Irvine. This eight-piece video of footage of the bat enclosure of Dublin Zoo and other assorted animals culminated in a video piece of Jackie hanging off a silver bridge in a black dress like a bat. It took the prize from Orla Barry for self-indulgent artistic wank by someone who should have just quit art and gone into therapy, or join a hippie commune. These were the cretins that were exhibiting in the very gallery's that had turned me down flat over and over again! While I went mad with regret and failure - they exhibited and taught other in Art College to produce equally pretentious and obscure works for art world insiders.   
                                                                                           

I saved the Howard Hodgkin until last and it did not disappoint. Hodgkin's work had no great meaning; it was a call to the senses. Much was made of memory and the recollection of lost moments, but since these were Howard's memories, I had no way of telling how accurately his splashes and dashes of colour depicted his life. Hodgkin confirmed the rule that most abstract painters were never more than fourth rate figurative artists, and their conversion to abstraction was a clever strategic move. But as an abstract painter Hodgkin was really first rate. Sometimes his over use of dabs and dots of colour could be off putting. But at his best he was wonderful. In his best canvases his taste for colour was delicious. His best work from the late 1970s to the early 1990s were clearly the result of constant and renewed readjustment. His paint was also wonderfully nuanced, from thin glazes to rich creamy impasto's, from jabbed splashes to feathered lines to sweeping lunges of the loaded brush. This was art - as pure unadulterated joy. Sadly the work from the late 1990s were woeful - sloppy and hastily thrown together. There was none of the readjustment and rich calculation of the great works, and the larger scale was usually disastrous. I would not have been surprised if I had been told Hodgkin had an elephant helping him to paint these later work.