E D I T O R I A L . 1 1

Thomas Adès by Phil Hale, 19 February 2003

These days, the National Portrait Gallery is making a real effort to de-fust itself. Many of its new acquisitions are photographs of people (Ms Dynamite, e.g.,) no-one had heard of a year or even six months ago and may, quite possibly, have forgotten in a similar amount of time. This makes it a far more fun place to visit; less a Pantheon than National Family Album.

Yet one of the most worthwhile of the Gallery’s recent commissions is very old-fashioned: a full-length oil painting by Phil Hale, runner-up for the BP Portrait Award, of the brilliant young composer Thomas Adès. ‘Full-length’ is perhaps the best shorthand description of it, for although Adès is shown tensely sprawling across a leather armchair, he seems, even so, to be toweringly tall. The emphatically vertical composition, coupled with the almost paraplegic twist of Adès’ body, seems a direct allusion to the tortured panel-painters of the turn of another century, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele.

It is hard to believe that anyone would choose to sit in this position for the length of time necessary for them to be painted; it is even harder to think oneself into the mind of the specific someone who did choose to sit this way.

Adès - a youthful, diet-starved Oscar Wilde - seems to be comprised entirely of discomfort: face dissatisfied with any expression it can fit itself into; bones unhappy with their disposition within his skin.
His physical angst is further emphasized by his clothes, which are redolent of a kind of jet-set relaxation: an uncrumpled, unstained cotton suit (the Mediterranean, strolls along harbourfronts) goes together with a white shirt, open at the neck (an invention of Lord Byron, as the concurrent Mad, Bad and Dangerous exhibition makes clear) and a pair of very fashionable, sportswear-influenced shoes (metropolitan money).

Adès’ despair is glamorized, stylised, and to a certain extent ironised (by the Secessionist framing) but we never for a moment doubt it is genuine. This is a young man, we are urged to think, engaged in matters existential, agonizing.

It looks to me as though Phil Hale is, as a painter, similarly wracked. This is, in many ways, an exemplary image – encapsulating the anxieties of the contemporary portraitist.

The most dominant influence on the style of the painting is, predictably, that of the most dominating portraitist of our time, Lucian Freud. Different sections of the canvas appear to be at war both with one another and with his influence. Adès’ shoes, seen through the glass of a table-top, are, unlike his face and hands, almost photo-realistic. Phil Hale seems almost but not quite confident he has his own, non-Freudian way of mixing fleshtones, his own manner of applying them to the canvas. (His style is more tasteful, perhaps one might say more ‘designer’ than Freud’s has been for a very long time.) Yet he is clearly caught, as so many visual artists are, midway between the photography and paint-as-paint.
One of Freud’s oldest compositional tricks is used, that of positioning the viewer’s eye several feet below the point from which the painting would ideally be looked at. This adds to the feeling that one is both lesser-than the subject and, literally, inferior to, unable to live up to, the artwork.

Where this portrait really succeeds is in depicting a figure of great interest in a way that at least attempts to show them as exceptionally individual, and therefore as capable of exceptional achievement. Too many of the National Portrait Gallery’s other recent acquisitions, particularly the photographic portraits, have tended to domesticate and normalize their subjects. Magnificent athletes are shown standing awkwardly around, rather than performing the feats for which they are famous; writers, politicians, scientists, models – all are shown in deeply unchallenging style-magazine-derived formats.

In contrast to this, Hale’s portrait of Adès seems a genuine act of investigation and of self-exposure. And, as it was always destined for the National Portrait Gallery, it shows a preparedness on Adès’ part not to appear cool or in control or anything other than morbidly, anxiously human. There is bravery in this; it’s more a slap across the face than a pat on the back.