Jonathan Yeo

Jonathan Yeo taught himself to paint in his early twenties and carved out a career in the nineties painting pop stars, royalty and Russian mafia. He became a big noise in portraiture, receiving commissions from the likes of Erin O’ Connor, David Walliams, Grayson Perry, Tony Blair and Nicole Kidman. In the noughties Yeo kept up his notoriety by flouting the rules. In 2001 he unveiled a triptych of Blair, Hague and Kennedy whose varying sizes acted as popularity barometers. In 2002 his photorealist paintings for Theo Fennell were pulled from US magazines for their graphic nudity. The next year he caused uproar at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters by dropping the curtain on a full frontal Ivan Massow.

In 2007, after toing and froing with the Dubya Bush camp over a portrait of their leader, Yeo decided to take matters into his own hands and masterminded ‘Bush Porn’ – a collage of the President of the United States made from pieces of hard-core porn. Bush’s furrowed brow is a mishmash of writhing naked flesh while his ear is a ripped-up finger-flick to the laws of the land (showing a sexual act reportedly illegal in the state of Texas). From this, came Blue Period, a show of pornographic images of celebrities, artists and nudes. Yeo gained wide-spread recognition for a controversial portrait of Tony Blair with a blood-red poppy in 2007 and commissions from the world’s glitterati continue to flood in.

Opinions on the route Yeo follows are divided. The National Portrait Gallery describes Yeo’s work as a combination of “photographic realism and a painterly touch”, Dennis Hopper describes it as “timeless and exquisite”, and the US Republican party calls it “extremely distasteful”.

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