1. … but on Reflection
A good-looking teenager catches sight of himself in the mirror of a still pool. Happening, as this does, long before the age of flat mirrors, it is the first time he has beheld his own rosy lips, dark eyes and shock of curls. Not so bad, a teenager might think, not a pimple anywhere, making a mwah-mwah at his own grin. But this sixteen-year-old isn’t joking. He is horribly smitten; taken by the violent onrush of love. Staring, not daring to move a muscle, Narcissus is impervious to everything and everyone else, especially the nymph Echo, to whom he has already given a heartless brush-off. Poor, formerly chatty Echo, punished for failing to reveal the carryings-on of Zeus – as if anyone needed a bulletin on that score – had been robbed of the gift of starting a conversation, reduced instead to repeating the fag end of anything she happens to hear. She does what she can with this limited means of introduction. ‘Anyone here?’ yells Narcissus when he gets the feeling he’s being stalked. ‘Here,’ cries the plaintive Echo, trembling invisibly in the glade. It’s no way for a girl to make an impression. Hurt by his indifference, she wastes away, becoming nothing but a heap of brittle bones before disappearing altogether into what’s left of her voice.
Really, men, what a sorry lot! The goddess Nemesis decides to punish Narcissus by letting him know, first hand, how unattainable love can do you in. Cue the pool, pond, spring, fountain, depending on how you translate your Ovidian fons. Narcissus can look and look, but the second he reaches towards his beloved with his hand, with his lips, the beautiful boy disappears in the ripples. Spectators see a crazy person crying, talking to himself. ‘O lovely youth,’ he sobs, his head shaking and breaking the vision in the water: ‘Why do you flee me? … Why do you vanish when I come to you, just as I reach out to you? … when I smile, so do you; when I weep, I see tears pour down your face …’ He’s not the brightest, our Narcissus, so dim in fact that, later, incredulous authors would rejig the myth to give him a sister for whom he has an incestuous passion, thinking it is her face which appears on the water. (This is supposed to be an improvement.) Either way, desperation takes its toll. His flesh attenuates, turning paler and paler until there is nothing left but a spectre. Pity at his plight stirs among the gods, but they are too late. Narcissus has become a spray of white petals with a yellow heart at its centre, rooted beside the mirroring water. In the second century CE, the travelling note-taker Pausanias claimed he had found the site of the Narcissian transformation on the chilly summit of Mount Helicon, beside the spring of Lamos. Cold and humid, the bloom was thought just right for funerals, but beware: its fragrance carried the power of great, if pleasurable, drowsiness: the condition the Greeks call narke. Apparently, self-infatuation was the first narcotic.
Almost a millennium and half after Ovid, in Florence, Leon Battista Alberti would write that that instant of narcotic rapture was the origin of all painting. In Book II of Della pittura, the first theoretically loaded treatise on art, Alberti defines painting as a vision of depth, an illusion projected on to a perfectly flat surface. ‘Consequently, I used to tell all my friends that, according to the poets, the inventor of painting was Narcissus, who was a flower, for as painting is the flower of the arts, so the tale of Narcissus fits our purpose perfectly, for what is painting except the embrace, by means of art, of the surface of the pool?’
How like the humanist optimist of the Renaissance to make the best of a bad situation. Earlier commentators and recyclers of the myth had always taken its moral to be chastening. ‘Has the story of Narcissus frightened you?’ Petrarch asks in his Secretum. Then beware the spell of vain apparitions. Never confuse surface with depth; illusion with reality. But Alberti shoos away the homily. The pathos of the floral metamorphosis becomes instead a self-congratulatory bouquet presented by painters to themselves. Perspective captures what had eluded Narcissus. Through the application of optical mathematics, the mirror-surface could metamorphose into an open window behind which depicted objects and figures take on an independent life of their own. Flatness is punched through to make the infinite depth in which stories could be enacted. Having his cake and eating it, as Renaissance writers were wont to do, the ingenious Alberti elsewhere concedes that painters fully understand that they are in the deception business. Even when art is committed to collapsing the difference between our perception of reality and our perception of a painting, it knows it is offering nothing more than a beautiful trick – but then again, why would you not want that?
Lucian Freud, twenty-five years old, drew Narcissus absorbed in his own reflection. He had been commissioned by the publishers MacGibbon and Kee to illustrate Rex Warner’s compendium of myths Men and Gods. All of his chosen heroes – Actaeon, Hercules and Hyacinth – came to bad ends; the last another floral post-mortem metamorphosis. But Freud, who would declare that all his work was, in the end, autobiographical, did not picture himself in the role of the self-struck lover. Instead it is the thick-lipped corduroy boy he had drawn smoking somewhere near Delamere Terrace, W2, where Freud was living. Just west of Little Venice and the Grand Union Canal, this corner of Paddington was entirely innocent of flat whites. Instead, there were working girls and dodgy louts lurking by the bridge, which is why Freud was attracted to the area. ‘Delamere was extreme and I was conscious of this. A completely unresidential area with violent neighbours. There was a sort of anarchic element of no one working for anyone.’
Over the course of his long career, Freud would mirror himself over and over again. Mostly, he liked what he saw, but he always stopped well short of narcissism; horrified by any kind of deluded self-infatuation, or even the unchecked outpouring of emotion. Expressionism was to be avoided at all costs. As if in resistance to his grandfather’s insistence that, whether we like it or not, we are all constructs of our repressed infantile desires, Lucian Freud set out to be sovereign over the instinctual. His ego never took its boot off the neck of his id. In 1948, rooting around Paddington and Maida Vale, he adopted the pose of undeluded cool, before the word had been re-coined. His painting and drawing was self-consciously hard-edged, linear and spiky (not just different from, but the antithesis to, the style which would make him a great artist). An early self-portrait from 1946 has him looking sidelong (a pose which would recur) at a thistle lying on a window ledge, an emblem of his own prickliness. All his life, Lucian Freud enjoyed the company of animals, sometimes more unequivocally than the company of people. As a schoolboy, he had driven a flock of sheep into the hall of his school. But in the 1940s he was more taken by dead ones – a defunct, half-shrivelled monkey; a rotting puffin; a heap of unplucked chicken parts in a bucket; his beloved stuffed zebra head – than the living editions. But there was one kind of pet to which he was especially partial. From Palmer’s pet shop Freud bought birds of prey, plus, to the distress of even the roughest neighbours, a buzzard. He would later say that there was nothing quite like touching the plumage of a wild bird, and it was evident that he felt some mysterious affinity with the sharp-eyed hunters, swift and lethal. In 1947, he drew a sparrowhawk perched on the head of a horse (another of Freud’s favourite animals), and around that time he made a pastel of one of the birds, the yellow beak disturbingly frontal. No genius is required to recognize this is an early self-portrait in thinly feathered disguise.
Freud was in no danger, then, of falling for the Narcissus syndrome. Instead, the gaze is transferred to the corduroy boy, but even then it is something other than mesmerized self-infatuation. The long-lashed lad stares, head in hands, at his reflection, but the mirror image is cropped to exclude the return gaze of the eyes, so the doubling is incomplete. Rapture is replaced by an expression of intense yet guarded meditation.
It was only later that Freud came to believe that his paint could remake flesh. That was because he had taken a decision to paint without drawing, a skill in which (with some reason) he always felt insecure. The young Freud battled that anxiety by making art which was seldom anything but drawing: all flattened contour and no texture. No wonder, then, that the grasp of reality eluded him almost as much as it did Narcissus. In July 1954 he published his ‘Thoughts on Painting’ in Encounter magazine, ending with the reflection that:
a moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then that the painter realizes that it is only a picture he is painting. Were it not for that the perfect painting might be painted on the completion of which the painter could retire. It is this great insufficiency that drives him on.
And, in his case, the ‘great insufficiency’ would drive Freud on to get much closer to the authentic life-effect, not least his own.
But in 1954, he was still a wary watcher: the hawk perched on the roost. That year, he took his second wife, the beautiful Caroline Blackwood, to Paris. And there he painted the two of them; her, as a friend noticed, looking much older than she actually was, haggard and stricken with anxiety in bed, bony fingers pressed neurotically into her cheeks as though about to tear the skin away. In the extraordinarily unpleasant picture, Freud enjoys painting himself in sinister silhouette, outlined against the hotel window, glaring unsympathetically at his miserable wife. His hands are dug into his pockets the way they are when disgust, uncomplicated by even a murmur of guilt, tramples on kindness. But then what does kindness have to do with art, any more than it stops the flight of the hawk?
