Nightmare of the Cabbage Patch Queen

Richard Brooks, Arts Editor

‘It’s a bad day, after Velazquez’


THE portrait of the Queen by Lucian Freud made her look as if she had swallowed a wasp. Rolf Harris admitted he nearly ended up painting the Queen as “a pork butcher from Norwich”. The latest attempt shows the monarch as a Cabbage Patch doll.
The new work by George Condo, the American artist, has been put on show at Tate Modern, a gallery that the Queen opened in May 2000. It has been hung — some will say appropriately — in the Wrong Gallery.



The Tate has been keeping diplomatically quiet about the oil painting, measuring about 18in by 15in. It appeared with no fanfare on the third floor next to a huge work by another American, Jackson Pollock.

Whether the Queen will be amused by her latest portrait is conjecture, although by now she must be used to enduring her unflattering likenesses.

Anthony Williams’s 1996 painting caused offence by ageing the Queen’s face and giving her “sausage fingers.” Justin Mortimer’s 1997 abstract appeared to have beheaded her, leaving her body floating on a bright yellow background.

In a more deferential age, Sir Herbert Gunn portrayed her in 1953 in her coronation robes as a regal mannequin. Two years later Pietro Annigoni produced the most enduring and popular image of her reign by depicting her as a beautiful young woman in flowing robes.

Besides a Cabbage Patch doll, the new version invites comparisons with Impedimenta, the wife of Chief Vitalstatistix in the Asterix books and a novelty confection in a cake shop.

Condo says he has modelled his portrait on the great Spanish artist Velazquez. “It’s the colour of her robes, which is Velazquez-like,” he said yesterday.

But how did it come out as it has? It is the Queen imagining herself having a bad day, he said: “Her puffed-out cheeks are the Queen’s nightmare. But she is smiling, too. I suppose it is a bit like a caricature or Cabbage Patch doll but that’s also because people like Cabbage Patch dolls.”

(Condo had not seen the new movie The Queen in which the monarch, portrayed by Helen Mirren, is called “cabbage”.) The idea for a portrait arose from a collaboration between Condo and Massimiliano Gioni, the Wrong Gallery’s curator. “The norm is, well, huge respect for your queen,” said Gioni. “This picture is not of course disrespectful.”

Condo, a noted New York artist whose works sell for six figures, was drawn to the project by “all that history and all that jewellery”, he said. “What I am trying to do is to get over how the Queen imagines herself.”

It could have been worse. Condo considered doing a nude portrait of the Queen in the style of Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus, displayed in the National Gallery. “I was told that you are not allowed to show members of the royal family nude in a public institution,” he said.

It has not deterred Condo. “I’ll be working on it next,” he said. He was not granted a sitting with the Queen, although he plans to send the portrait to the Prince of Wales in the hope that Charles will use his influence to secure a live session. “After all, she did it for Lucian Freud.”

Condo was inspired to paint nine pictures of the Queen. One had a carrot going through her head. Others saw her as a Picasso-style abstract and a skeletal face with a staring eye.

In hallowed tradition, the final result has attracted withering scorn. “It’s embarrassingly bad,” said Brendan Kelly, a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. “When you paint a portrait of anybody you should create a legend. This will just create a fuss.”

Andrew James, the society’s secretary, was not so dismissive. “It’s unsettling, but the picture speaks to you directly,” he said.

“There is a cartoon-like quality, certainly in the eyes, but I don’t mean ‘cartoon-like’ in the pejorative sense. She has a youthful and pretty neck in the portrait although her blown-out cheeks are very much a grandmother’s. And I like the spiky crown.”

The Tate said: “George Condo is a well respected artist and this is a very interesting imaginary work.” The gallery was not embarrassed by the portrait, it added.