After Jonathan Yeo’s “Portrait of His Majesty King Charles III” was unveiled at Buckingham Palace on May 14, its bold and unexpected infusion of red paint made the portrait an instant internet meme. Widely shared on social media, the portrait cut through the web like a hot knife slicing butter, setting off a flurry of discussions about its implications, ranging from passion to mortality. As this was happening, I realized that Yeo’s portrait is a prime example of Disrupted Realism, a genre of contemporary painting that I have been researching for years.
An international phenomenon that encompasses a broad range of individual approaches, the genre combines aspects of realism with other stylistic ingredients. Especially popular in the United States and Britain — where artists including Ben Ashton, Jenny Saville, and Justin Mortimer are among its leading practitioners — Disrupted Realism encourages a flexible, subjective approach to painting that allows for improvisation and often fuses representation and abstraction in unexpected ways. This freedom to hybridize styles allows artists to suggest ambiguous and varied meanings in a way that straightforward realism cannot.
In the case of King Charles’s royal portrait, the artist’s decision to set the monarch’s face and figure in a broadly brushed red environment disrupts its semblance of realism. Aware in advance that this choice would raise questions, Yeo offered a statement on his website: “The vivid colour of the glazes in the background echo the uniform’s bright red tunic, not only resonating with the royal heritage found in many historical portraits but also injecting a dynamic, contemporary jolt.”
When the painting and its unveiling went viral, it was the “jolt” of red that resonated more than any royal symbolism. The possible meanings that social media users shook loose included the idea that the artist intended to reference the bloody past of British colonialism. Others made comparisons to highly charged paintings in art history, such as Edvard Munch’s “Self-Portrait in Hell” (1903) and “Picture of Dorian Gray” (1943–44) by Ivan Albright. Some surmised that the use of a color that can be read as visceral or morbid was due to King Charles’s ongoing cancer treatments. In this case, it should be noted that Yeo himself was struck by a serious heart attack last year that he suspects was connected to cancer treatments in his early 20s. Perhaps the symbolic red reflects the shared experience of the artist and his sitter.
In an era of endless distraction, the reputations of contemporary paintings are now largely determined by the internet, where images that engage viewers emotionally and generate controversy can cut through distraction — not to mention their ability to be boosted by algorithms that favor controversial images and topics. Experiencing paintings in person, where their subtleties can be carefully observed and considered, feels less relevant than ever. Ideally suited to serving as a meme, Yeo’s “Portrait of His Majesty King Charles III” demonstrates that paintings in the age of the internet need to be clever far more than they need to be good.
