The MagazineSitting PrettyWhat’s so good about Lucian Freud?Oct 4, 2010, Vol. 16, No. 03
• By MAUREEN MULLARKEY
 Man with a Blue Scarf  ‘The Painter Surprised By a Naked Admirer,’ 2005 Photo Credit: AP, National Portrait Gallery On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud Art critics have been sitting for their portraits since Diderot, grandaddy of modern criticism, modeled for Fragonard. Under 18th-century Prussian rigor, aesthetics hardened into a discipline. Critics arose as arbiters and exegetes. The benefits of painting them rose, too. Johann Winckelmann, pioneer of art historical methodology, posed for Anton Mengs; Immanuel Kant, for lesser lights. John Ruskin held his stance for John Millais. Émile Zola sat for Manet; Baudelaire, for Courbet; Apollinaire, for Vlaminck. Historic pairings differ from contemporary ones in that earlier writers’ claims to eminence rested on their writing, their ideas. Today’s critic stakes his immortality on his subject’s celebrity. Or aptitude for it. Enter Martin Gayford, critic, and author of The Yellow House, a lively sketch of Van Gogh and Gauguin together in Arles, and Constable in Love. Both prove Gayford a deft biographer of the well-known and documented dead. But something happens in company with the living. Man with a Blue Scarf is the diary of seven months spent, at the author’s own request, as Lucian Freud’s model. The result is oddly redolent of Facebook: Gayford wants you to know that Freud agreed to “friend” him, and he cannot quite get over it. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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