courtesy of the Bradley Manning Support Network.
The Passion of Bradley Manning:
The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History
Chase Madar
OR Books, 2012.
Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism… should be encouraged rather than stifled. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that… whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process +
The Obama Biden Plan, 2007
Daniel Ellsberg may not have been the American beau idéal, but he came pretty close. Ellsberg served as an infantry lieutenant in the Marine Corps with real battle experience in Vietnam, a PhD in economics from Harvard, and a held gig as a defense analyst for the Cold War giant, RAND. In short, Ellsberg was a poster-child of our cherished meritocracy, righteously flung far into the empyrean of the military industrial complex.
A Daniel Ellsberg, Bradley Manning is not, though the obvious parallels exist. Both military analysts, who, despite the ubiquitous insistence on the “fog of war” and its impenetrability, felt themselves duty-bound, to make lucid and public what, either by means of apathy or mendacity, their comrades in arms let go unspoken. In Chase Madar’s new book, The Passion of Bradley Manning, he makes the obvious yet disturbing point that “some three million Americans have a security clearance: did none of these people who came into contact with the Collateral Murder video see it fit for public release?” Both Ellsberg and Manning have had their character and motives impugned, not by serious argument or riposte, but by rather vicious campaigns of calumny and slander.
In his essay The Art and Arts of Howard E. Hunt, Gore Vidal imagines the condemning exchange between Dr. Fielding and Ellsberg, the one that would prove the Cold War syllogism of contra-Washington pro-Moscow:
Doctor Fielding, I have these terrible headaches. They started just after I met my control Ivan and he said, ‘Well, boychick, it’s been five years now since you signed on as a controlled agent. Now I guess you know that if there’s one thing we Sovs hate it’s a non-producer so….’ Doctor Fielding, I hope you’re writing all this down and not just staring out the window like last time.
Unfortunately, this type of fabrication would have been a marked improvement on the current discourse concerning honesty, which has taken a pathological tone. Take the writer Joy Reid, whose exegesis included the admittedly original notion that Manning was “a guy seeking anarchy as a salve for his own personal, psychological torment + )” These comments oblige the reader (or viewer; Reid is an MSNBC contributor) to think not in terms of right or wrong, but psychic instability where unstable types like Manning commit acts of which most law abiding, sexually resolute people would not even dream. He has also received condemnation, in the pages of OUT Magazine from James Kirchick, a contributing editor to The New Republic, who proffered the idea that Manning was one of those gay soldiers who will “act out their emotional problems by leaking classified material to individuals with an explicit agenda of harming the interests of the United States and its allies.” These points are not without historical precedent. Neocon pundit Norman Podhoretz tells us that, post-defeat in Vietnam, the United States should look back and contemplate the horrors of pacifism precipitated by a secret buggery-loving lobby (his historical precedent was the enervated 1930’s war effort in England, again, the onus of responsibility sits with some type of vague anti-masculine mentality).1
Bradley Manning was born 17 December 1987, in the town of Crescent, Oklahoma. Manning’s mother Susan hailed from Wales and his father was in the navy, stationed at Cawdor Barracks. He was mildly precocious, excelling in reading and mathematics from a very young age, refusing to say under God during a recitation of the pledge of allegiance. By all accounts his childhood was a tempestuous affair: he was bullied constantly, switching from his mother’s house in Wales to his father’s house in Oklahoma. He was unable to hold down a job at Zoto, a Tulsa based software company, and a series of fights with Manning’s father and his new wife eventuated in his flight from home. He then began an itinerant life, living out of his pickup truck, moving from Tulsa to Chicago and finally settling with his aunt in Washington DC. After working a few menial jobs, Manning did the “last thing anyone would expect a 5’2’’ openly gay nineteen-year-old with a fierce independent streak” to do, “he enlisted +”
One might in fact wish that this were, for the sake of Manning, not the case. It does not take much imagination to think that Manning, as a soldier in Fort Leonard Wood so tersely phrased it, “took it from every side.” He was swiftly placed in the discharge unit, which is tantamount to military expulsion. One problem: The all-volunteer army was about as robust as the Coalition of the Willing, so the young Manning was “recycled” to a field that fit him well — military intelligence.
After a small stint of intelligence training in Arizona, he was moved cross-country to Fort Drum in New York State. By 2009, after some deliberation he was deployed to forward operating base Hammer (FOB Hammer), deep in the desert 35 miles west of Baghdad. FOB Hammer resembles the odd dysphoric vision of any secluded military base, ‘a large windowless warehouse full of computers and desks and power cords’ where ‘they loved to watch…clips of Apaches [helicopters] gunning down people and whatnot’ (quoted from FOB-stationed Jimmy Rodriguez). By this time, Manning had access to SIPRNet, The Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, the system that the Department of Defense uses to ferry classified information. The Pentagon approximates that nearly 500,000 people and a short list of allied nations have access to SIPRNet. Manning also had access to Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, or JWICS — the interagency database that included the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, State and Justice.
Madar notes that the moment of permutation and disillusionment did not come immediately.2 Two events, or insights, proved to be the catalyst for his later disclosures. In the first, he was made to carry out an investigation regarding some anti-Maliki dissident literature which asked “Where did the money go?”. Manning:
i immediately took this information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on… he didn’t want to hear any of it…he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees…
This was all part of a furtive and continuous policy of abetting Iraqi authorities use of torture, a practice that was prescribed for terrorist actions, bringing into question the honesty of the American regime: Donald Rumsfeld had issued fragmentary order 242, which “set out a specific policy of non-interference in Iraqi torture.” The second event, an aerial video, shot on 12 July 2007, captured an AH-64 Apache helicopter shelling a congregation of Iraqis who were mingling with insurgents. By the end, 11 people were killed, civilians greatly outnumbering the insurgents. The video, later released by Wikileaks to the National Press Club, which was aptly named “Collateral Damage”, provides a pointillist dot, one of the thousands needed to fill the La Grande Jatte scope of what Christopher Hitchens called “the postponed liberation of Iraq.”
At 3:07:01 pm Manning told Lamo that he “could not let these thing stay inside of the system… inside of my head.”
At 3:11:07 Manning said, “i kept that in my mind for weeks… probably a month and a half… before I forwarded it to them”.
The second event was the Collateral Murder video, and the “them” was the already known, but not yet renowned Wikileaks organization. Collateral was the trickle in what would become a deluge of information. Wikileaks would subsequently divulge 91,731 of the Afghan War Logs, 391,832 of the Iraq War Logs and 251,287 State Department Cables. The much neglected, or suppressed, fact is, in contrast with many other moments in the history of exfiltration, none of the documents were classified as top secret.
In an unflustered and honest assessment of the history and treatment of leaks and leakers entitled Whistleblowers and Their Public, Madar simultaneously places Manning in the pantheon of Whistleblowers and tries to answer Alex Cockburn’s question — What ends wars? — as well as deal with his answer: One side is annihilated, the money runs out, the troops mutiny, the government fails or fears that it will. His incipient example is Adam Smith — who, in charting the mercantilist policies of colonial powers, used classified information provided by the French Crown, detailing the use of torture by the French Republic in Algeria. Madar’s history finally leads to John G. Eikenberry’s cable (leaked to the New York Times ) that stated the surge was the wrong policy, and that the Department of Defense’s counterinsurgency policy should be defenestrated. These facts should be taken contrapuntally, against the fact that Manning believed in the idea of a public that, upon receiving this previously undisclosed information, would take action. In short — information leads to action.
However, Madar does not paint a wholly monochrome picture. Ray McGovern, a retired CIA analyst, gave the author two examples of leaks that may have had an appreciable impact in war planning. The first is a much-lesser-known document given by Ellsberg to Robert Kennedy, detailing plans to use ‘small tactical nuclear bombs’ and increase the troop count by 26,000. Kennedy raised his voice on the senate floor and rallied a strong opposition3. In 2007 the National Intelligence Estimate — on the purported nuclear designs of Iran (namely, that they were not developing weapons) — were made public. The administration allowed for this because it believed a leak to be inevitable, so it chose the declassification road instead. Madar closes with a sensible point: information is not exactly toothless (evinced by the punitive actions taken against Manning), however, without the proper network and movements behind it, it is very likely to make an “inaudible thud on impact.”
So, what of the leaks, a question that takes up the second largest chapter of the book? What have we learned? Madar reports that there is no exact count of documents that are made classified every year, however 77 million documents were classified in 2010. Documents from Madison’s presidency are just ascending, etiolated, from an internment that has lasted over two centuries. However, as we have learned from Judith Miller and Barack Obama, leaking is not always bad, sometimes it can lubricate a war-weary nation, or make the president seem tough on terrorists. Madar makes audible the vast and idiotic cacophony of laughter and forgetting that is our intelligence classification and dissemination services. He does this not to call for stricter controls, but for a harsh examination of the present system.
A multifarious group, ranging from Slavoj Žižek (“The only surprising thing about the WikiLeaks revelations is that they contain no surprises”) to Robert Gates has, for sometimes diametrically opposing reasons, gainsaid the importance of the leaks. Gate’s syllogism, which cannot be blithely dismissed, goes as follows: it was maybe an ugly blunder, however the U.S. is the still the hegemon, therefore, other countries will stay in line. Žižek maintained that we “knew” everything already, that there were no real disclosures to speak of; only a change in the way in which the flow of information, and thus power, is structured. This seems nearly half correct. While it is true that Wikileaks mode of disclosure is nearly sui generis, it seems that Žižek is trying to enliven what is an otherwise apt description (the change in structure), with the rhetorical gambit (downplaying the content of the documents). In short, his mistake is to confuse the potential with the actual, the confirmation with the assumption (ironically, Žižek has chided the Iranian jurists who banned the wearing of metal heels, for fear of exciting their male compatriots — he assumes the jurists conflated the potential of male arousal with the assurance that upon being stimulated, men would descend into an unstoppable sexual rage).
Madar is punctilious in the charting department. We have learned the body count in Iraq was about 15,000 more than previously known, making the total count something like 150,000, eighty percent of which is civilians. We have learned about fragmentary order 242, a strictly non-interventionist, although expressed as non-isolationist, policy regarding the use of torture by Iraqi police and military personnel. We have learned about, or rather confirmed the shameful detention and treatment of the prisoners at Gitmo. We learned that King Abdullah has been trying to push the U.S. towards a pugilistic confrontation with Iran. We learned about the de facto U.S. support for the 2009 coup d’etat in Honduras. We learned that, in another fit of Monroe Doctrine nostalgia, the U.S. colluded with Hanes, Levi-Strauss, and Fruit of the Loom in Haiti, to ensure the minimum wage did not rise, bravely not allowing the people to rise from penurious to destitute.
In the second half of the book, Madar tries to tackle an issue that is now de rigueur among the moderate American Left: the fairness of international law, in particular the treatment of prisoners, both domestic and alien. In his conversations with Lamo, Manning makes a seemingly simple point, one that may serve as a guide to Madar’s approach towards dissecting the legitimation of American action: “just because something is more subtle, does not make it right.”
“I might well advise a client to ten years in the communal wing of Guantanamo over three years in the solitary at the super-max in Florence,” says Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights, seems astonishing at the least, and like a dereliction of a counsel’s duty to a client at worst. Maybe Kadial is a CIA agent incognito, because, as every well-informed American knows, Guantanamo is the superlative example of incarceration as hell. The fact a client would do well to heed this advice, or at least seriously contemplate it is something that is practically unspeakable. Maybe it is structurally impossible; we can label black-sites like Guantanamo as heinous excesses, their potency being draw from the fact that they are the exception (and thus manageable; even agreeable)4 .
Christopher Glazek’s recent essay for n+1 clearly states a point towards which Madar moves only symptomatically. The torture of Bradley Manning is not an aberration, attributable to political visibility and expediency. Rather, a great number of prisoners, being punished for a great variety of crimes are treated in a manner that is either strikingly similar or exponentially worse. Manning’s torture and confinement (the two, as in all long-term solitary confinement cases, are axiomatically linked) serves as a dual indictment. There are currently more than 25,000 prisoners in long-term isolation in the United States. This is a fantastic number, considering the effects of what Atul Gawande described as:
After a few months without regular social contact, however, his experience proved no different from that of the P.O.W.s or hostages, or the majority of isolated prisoners whom researchers have studied: he started to lose his mind. He talked to himself. He paced back and forth compulsively, shuffling along the same six-foot path for hours on end.
This was, and is not the only option. In 1980, the Supreme Court came close to abolishing long-term solitary confinement, and:
In June of 2006, a bipartisan national task force, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, released its… It called for ending long-term isolation of prisoners. Beyond about ten days… practically no benefits can be found and the harm is clear—not just for inmates but for the public…
“Every American prison functions as a black site,” says Glazek. The righteously contemptible features of prisons upon which progressive critics stake their livelihood are present in their domestic, uncontroversial counterparts — not as moments of overzealous guards or instances of “poor planning,” but as fundamental features and habitual practices. So, about a year ago, Bruce Ackerman of Yale Law School and Yochai Benkler of Harvard Law School sent off a missive to the New York Review, cataloguing the way in which Manning is subjected to “degrading and inhumane conditions that are illegal and immoral.” There is no doubt the case, however, is not an isolated one.
In 1963 Hannah Arendt fired off a series of long dispatches from Jerusalem covering the Eichmann trial for New Yorker. The articles precipitated a small mushroom cloud of controversy, with the attending fallout5. In a chapter entitled Duties of a Law-Abiding Citizen, it is noted that Eichmann claims something rather astonishing, “He had lived his life according to Kant’s moral precepts…according to a Kantian definition of duty+” Arendt lucidly maps the distortions and perversions that accompanied the nazification of the categorical imperative. What was meant, as the means for moral integrity was comprehended as a manual for perfect immorality. However, as she follows up by reminding the reader “Eichmann did indeed follow Kant’s precepts: A law was a law, and there could be no exception.” I have no intention of drawing histrionic parallels (the catch of “law is law” is a excuse far too common). However, Madar quotes a response given by President Obama to a group of Manning supports, “I have to abide by certain rules of classified information … we are a nation of laws.” Rules are rules.
The “rules” truism, in Madar’s estimation, is a cover for misconduct all throughout the international field. The Geneva Conventions take a less than stalwart stand on the responsibility of occupying armies, the is especially important with respect to fragmentary order 242, not to mention the lacunae that, for obvious logistical/historical reasons, are the rules and punishments for aerial bombardment. Basic morality, so goes the standard assumption, is imperfectly intagliated on our system of law. Evidence of the basic amoral, if not immoral structure of our current international legal regime gets a particularly pointed treatment in Madar’s account. It is not only that the foundational documents of international law and armed conflict are sometimes woefully incomplete, their governing body, The International Committee of the Red Cross, has lost the power to interpret laws with Vatican-esque finality; there now exists a profusion of bodies, many of them with competing interests and ideologies ready to stake a claim to legality. The result is a capricious application of the law in some instances, porous laws in others.
The fate of Manning is, in all probability, sealed. He lingers on our consciousness like a dissipated mist, rising above the trees and disappearing into the seemingly unadulterated morning of the future. He will be convicted and condemned to live, just as we are condemned, only lacking the conviction.
- For a comprehensive assessment of this attitude see Charlie Davis’ article at Salon
- In almost all accounts of any given whistleblower’s metamorphosis there is an almost pathological need (my summa of Ellsberg’s life included) to evoke the chiaroscuro of positions and opinions. “Patriotic ideals” are thrown into sharp relief by the realities of service and hierarchy, the dissolution of agency under the burden of command leading to questions about the basic validity or integrity of the cause or object, the growing gap between official positions and rhetoric and the actuality of an occupying army. While there may be some factual truth to this story, regarding the changing commitments and ideals of the person in question, it would do one well to recognize the element of ideology latent in this picture.
- Although, after reading Cario’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, vis-à-vis the hate-loathe relationship between RFK and LBJ, and knowing the Kennedy relationship between politics and political expediency, one might just want to chalk this up to luck.
- To this point Madar cites an article by Adrian Vermeule, published in the Harvard Law Review, entitled “Our Schmittian Administrative Law”. This instance in particular is part of general rise, or recrudescence of the Schmittian notion that there needs to be a unitary executive, one whose authority may not be subsumed.
- So much obloquy was in no small part due to the perception that Arendt was, in the words of Lionel Abel, guilty of making Eichmann “aesthetically palatable while his victims are aesthetically repulsive.” For a compressive overview of the reaction and other vicissitudes regarding the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem in particular and Arendt in general, see the late Amos Elon’s imperishable introduction to the Penguin Classic edition.
unfinished 'Portrait of the Hound,' 2011. courtesy of Lucien Freud / National Portrait Archive.
Lucian Freud: Painting People
Yale University Press, 2012.
Lucian Freud by William Feaver
Rizzoli, 2007.
While the practice of psychoanalysis is all but embalmed and placed in its coffin, this year has been nothing if not Freudian. Lucian Freud died last July, at the age of 88, on a two-week respite from painting the unfinished Portrait of the Hound. Freud knew his body — hawk-like and sinuously muscular up until and into his crepuscular years — was falling away, beginning to look like the people he painted. He left the legs of the dog unpainted, focusing on the faces of the two creatures. He died, in that hoary old cliché, doing what he loved. He was animated and maintained, up until the end — “the work is everything.”
Robert Hughes pronounced in his 1987 catalog on Freud for the Hirshhorn Museum: “Lucian Freud has become the greatest living realist painter.” He was both technically gifted and pictorially astute, both lugubrious and unendingly prescient. A week after Freud’s death, the Metropolitan Museum of Art amended “British Painting After World War II” to the more relevant “Homage to Lucian Freud”. This past month, two blocks away, the Acquavella Galleries presented an exhibition of Lucian Freud’s drawings. There is the book recently published by the Yale University Press, which includes a foreword from Sarah Howgate, contemporary curator of the National Portrait Gallery of London, an introduction from Martin Gayford and a small tribute from David Hockney reprinted from the London Evening Standard Both Gayford and Hockney recount experiences of having the portrait painted by Freud). That is not to mention the just closed Lucian Freud: Portraits, National Portrait Gallery in London and the exhibition of his drawings at the Blain/Southern (the antecedent to the Acquavella show). There is an unsavory but persistent question that hangs around the neck of Freud’s legacy: would he have been as renowned if his grandfather had not founded modern day psychoanalysis? Questions like this are inevitable, however, they come with there own pregnant version of an uncertainty principle. One could never give a dispassionate answer. However, it would not be impertinent to suggest that between Freud fils and Freud grand-père, a plausible case could be for, if not parity, at least a recognition that more penetrating insight was not necessarily gained from the patients laying on the Viennese sofa. Sometimes, it was on the deliciously ratty maroon divan, in London, where the greatest creations of the Freudian came into fruition.
Lucian Freud was born near Berlin’s Teirgarten, on December 8, 1922, the second son of Ernst Freud (an architect in profession, an amateur painter and son of Sigmund) and Lucie Brasch. The dissociating and dislocating penumbra of National Socialism grew in step with the young Lucian. Those who called for the purity of Volk and a new 1000 year Reich were ascendant, the Jews and the educated middle classes of mitteleuropa (the Freud family claimed membership to both) looked on in horror, even the unparalleled fin de siècle wit, Karl Krauss, could only muster up the charge of stupidity against Hitler and his brown-shirts. One must try and imagine what it was like, to spend one’s formative years in a state of existential uncertainty. The condition of dread, the fear that your neighbor, not to say your neighborhood, was always on the precipice — the knowledge that the lions were waiting ravenously below, and those whom you thought to be your friends, were standing with an inflexible hand at your back, ready to stiff-arm at a moments notice. Lucian Freud’s comment “I hate being watched when at work. All the real pleasures were solitary; I can’t even read when others are about,” attests to the fact that in childhood, during his formation, he acquired certain propensities: an eye for the errant but necessary detail and a sense that solitude was not only important but an indispensable virtue for both learning and creating.
In order to flee the ever-widening conflagration, Ernst took his family to London. Lucian, by this time 11 years old, attended a series of private schools (Dartington Hall and Bryanston), where he was, with almost unnerving consistency booted to the door for improper behavior. This is made all the more spectacular by the fact that these were not, as Robert Hughes points out, not “the cloistered, philistine, flogging-and-fagging stereotype of an English boarding school,” but socially progressive institutions. During his first years in London, his work was shown in series of children’s exhibitions at the Guggenheim-Jeune Gallery and amassed an impressive corpus of drawings and sculpture, one of which — a sandstone rendering of a house, an animal in which he retained a life long affection — earned him a place in the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. His drawings from this time, many of which were shown at the Acquavella Galleries, are cartoon-like, extensively detailed and filled with death, toys, and the wonder of a world extending impossibly beyond a young child’s grasp. In his teenage years, drawing was the form where he was, both most at home, as well as most readily drawn to. Finishing his studies at the Central School, Freud moved to the quieter East Anglia School of Drawing and Painting, and came under the instruction of the autodidact painter Cedric Morris. After much encouragement from Morris, he made his leave in a fiery blaze of glory by, namely, smoking in bed and setting the school aflame.
It was in 1939, after he became a denizen of Soho, that “his life really began.” He made friends with, and very much impressed the admittedly doe-eyed Stephen Spender. This led to a long friendship and numerous connections including Cyril Connolly the editor of Horizon (who published many of his early drawings), and Sir Kenneth Clark the director of the National Gallery. It has been repeatedly pointed out that there is some similarity between Freud’s earlier painting such as Man With A Flower (Self-Portrait) (1943) with it strongly demarcated background and tight-lipped arctic expressions, and the Neue Sachlichkeit style. Although it would be untrue to say that Freud was an acolyte or even a surveyor of this movement, some of the form and style seeped, consciously or not, into his painting. His next major (and maybe the most infectious) living influence followed from a 1944 meeting with the London painter Francis Bacon. It is also in this year that he has the first of many exhibitions in the Lefevere Gallery in London. The next year, on a grant from the London Gallery, he made an aesthetic démarche to Paris, where he met Picasso and Giacometti (and was a model for the second). In 1948 he married Kitty Garmen, the daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein and his consummate model, had his first child, Annie and was hired by Slade School of Art, as a tutor.
By the late 1940s, Freud had focused his eye on Ingres, that neoclassical defender who wished for nothing more than for painting to build an integument against the insurrection of Romanticism, led by Delacroix’s Lady Liberty. In William Feaver’s Lucian Freud and Robert Hughes’ 1987 catalog, it is made clear that any affirmative association with German expressionism was stamped out by the influence of Ingres. As Hughes notes:
Ingres surfaced especially in Freud’s portraits” in one of his earliest portraits Girl with Roses (1947), painted under the spell of Ingres and the Flemish quattrocento, but to convey a sense of dislocation…the painting of a man excruciatingly conscious of style who has nevertheless learned to circumvent mannerism in the interests of feeling.
Ingres charms would remain with him, for the rest of his life: the cool and muted sense of color, the focus on the power of delineation. Ingres was not only a source of inspirations, it was a link to a tradition, as T.S. Eliot notes in Tradition and the Individual Talent: “His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead”.
Freud, set Ingres, for reasons of both contrast and emulation, in a position of great significance. An anecdote from Amaury-Duval’s, L’Atelier d’Ingres (translated by James Fenton), could be imagined mutatis mutandis between Freud and fellow painter:
One day in the studio the painter Jean-Pierre Granger complimented Ingres on his Oedipus. “I recognize the model,” Granger said.
“Ah!” said Ingres, “is that so? Is it really like him?”
“Yes, but you’ve made him far, far more beautiful.”
“What? Made him more beautiful? I’ve just copied him, copied him slavishly.”
“As you please, but he was never as beautiful as that.” This was the perfect way to exasperate Ingres, since it was tantamount to accusing him of not following his own doctrines.
“But look,” Ingres replied, “since you remember him, it must be his portrait…”
“Idealized,” said Granger.
“Indeed,” said Ingres, “well, think what you like; but my ambition is to copy my model, to be his very humble servant, and I do not idealize.”
“Idealized or not,” said Granger, “it’s very beautiful.”
It was a few years later that Freud blossomed as the living English portraitist without parallel. By 1952 he had painted Girl in Bed (1952), an exquisite work in which a girl with Scandinavian arches is lost in some day-dreamscape, vulnerable and undisturbed. The emotional rhythms carry from one woman to the next (Freud was the ne plus ultra progenitor of London; 14 children have been verified, the rumors say 40). One picture that is conspicuously missing from Painting People is the 1952 portrait of Francis Bacon painted on a copper plate. This small depiction is an almost ethereally well-structured composition, the amber glow that connected the lips, hair, and eyes, radiates around the pallor of the flatter, almost plane like surfaces of Bacon’s face. Freud imposes his vision, while Bacon pose seems unassailably natural; it is the wedding of reality and vision. It was also the year in which he painted his vatic, and no less moving Portrait of John Minton (1952). The longitude of his face seems to extend taking up most of the canvas, long enough as to be retractable. Nothing droops, not the lips, or eyes, or nose, but the is a crushing weight to the face. The wide askew eyes, the taut skin covering around high cheekbones, and the slightly mussed black hair, all grasp what no one else seemed to see, that, as Peter Campbell put it, “his downward spiral into alcoholism, and depressions which were exacerbated by unsatisfactory love affairs”, were the overtures to his own fingers clamping out the candle of his life.
Wilde’s oft quoted epigram captures some of the spirit of Freud’s quasi-expressionistic phase: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” Freud’s relationship with the mask-like nature of the face dates back to his earlier, if disavowed relationship to German expressionism. In German expressionism, the face performs as a kind of surface-layer, being equal to other pieces of the environment. Freud, as any causal viewer can tell, did not maintain this attitude for any length of time. In his later work, the face is the non-negotiable focal point. This is particularly clear in light of his triptych: Large Interior w9 (1973), The Painter’s Mother Reading (1975) and The Painter’s Mother Resting (1976). In these two, as well as The Painter’s Mother, (1982–1984) there is a sense of almost implacable devotion to the (then) recently widowed Lucie. Her expression is concentrated on some distant point, beyond the grayness of the room, the soft, simple, comfort of her clothes. Large Interior w9, the two subjects, Lucie and a naked women (Freud’s belle), are completely oblivious to each other’s existence, each intently staring at the walls that contain them, and thinking, about the man that is detaining them. Both his mother and his girlfriend meet in the farthest corner of the room, her knees, hidden under a brown blanket rise with near perfect symmetry over Lucie’s head, her hands ever so slightly clenched, the old sinuous ligaments rendered with clear definition.
There is nothing sexy in Freud’s portraits. A monitory note: lasciate ogni speranza. Gliding my eyes along the page, I am sorry to report that there will be no inflaming of the loins, and spontaneous salivation will, if fact, not occur. There are no soft translucent robes, no teasing lines between cloth and flesh. When the subjects are thin, they are something like emaciated, when the subjects are large- such as The Benefits Supervisor Resting (1994), or Leigh Bowery (Seated) (1990) — they are almost comically oversized. Leigh Bowery (an Australian performance artist) looks like nothing so much as an awkward Porphyrion. Bowery is far, far too large for the red velvet chair on which he sits. There is a certain pre-Olympian ethos to him, the grim luminosity of the flesh, the wild bewildered eyes, the incongruity of his bearing, fighting against the banality of the room. He imposes himself like Wallace Steven’s jar:
It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It seems as if the later portraits were based on the men and women of the street, discovered, much in the tradition of Baudelaire’s wandering narrator’s observations in Fleurs du Mal:
Her legs were spread out like a lecherous whore
Sweating out poisonous fumes,
Who opened in slick invitational style
Her stinking and festering womb
One imagines that it may be worse to smell, rather than look at his paintings. Freud made redoubtable use of the impasto, corpulent, almost varicose painting (a style that he picked up from Bacon, the means being a switch from sable hair to hog hair brushes) was the best way to get sallow look of cooled sweat that moments before, trickled from the dells of the anemic and in the folds of the rotund. There is a disconcerting way in which Freud both catalogues the simultaneous falling and bunching of flesh as the body ages. There is a photograph of Freud painting in media res his Man With A Blue Scarf (the sitter is Martin Gayford, who penned the introduction). In the photo, Gayford looks not exactly youthful, but young for his age. In Freud’s rendering his eyes are aloof, like all of his portraits, the cheeks are creased and while the result is not exactly Wildean, there is something of Freud’s propensity to focus on what we hope others do not see when they sit across from you on the morning train.
In the introduction to this slim volume, Gayford pronounces that “Everything in his pictures is the opposite of abstract: concrete, awkward factual, nothing ever idealized or generalized”. First, this assessment is strikingly similar to Ingres’ own characterization of his work. Second, although sensu stricto, there is no abstraction to speak of, the fact of decay and immobilization (just as the beauty of Ingres’ Oedipus) cannot be accounted for without speaking to the fact that there is some form of idealization; the non-eudaemonic, the ability, to give life and dignity to the reality of life, in all of its slow and irresistible deterioration. Mark Doty recalls the image of:
Fat and shadow, oil and wax,
mobility solidified, like cooled grease in a can
Freud derived from the conflicting expressions, energies and animations of his models, and intense personal realism. This is not a vulgar, photographic realism. It is more like when Van Gogh spoke of the “reassuring, familiar look of things.” His later portraits present a world that is not based on the pretense of objectivity, however, nonetheless when we are looking at his paintings there is no doubt that what is shown has something to do with what is real.
What can we make of the face and Freud’s propensity to revise it to fit his ends? Should one, in the final account, dismiss the raw impasto, the conglomerated flesh? First, on must remember is that the face itself (the exterior structure: nose, eyes, lips, even skin) is not fixed. There is plasticity to any visage. As Freud was gazing upon his model, he seemed to assume some primordial power; his vision would be realized because, when it came down to it, his vision was real. His gaze effectively becomes the sum of all your actions, especially your misdeeds. Orwell said, by age of 40 everyone gets the face they deserve. When in Freud’s studio, everyone gets the face he observes. He gathers up all of the disparate and changing shapes dancing across the brow of the sitter, lingering on the bed; the sun on the floor and the casting of the shadow, that long indomitable shadow, across the sitters face. The point on which his entire enterprise hinges was told by Freud to Williams Feaver “I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them.”
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