Jane: A Living Picture Poem by Richard George

I'm resisting the temptation
(now you work at Tate Modern)
to visit you like one of the exhibits:
but I wonder how a century
of painters might have seen you.
Picasso flattens you
to an ironic eyebrow's hypotenuse:
Modigliani strings you out
like an inscrutable almond.
Chagall depicts you flying with a goat,
which is not how I envisage you:
Bacon's plastic surgery
leaves you simian, resentful.
(Wyndham Lewis sketched you,
but never completed the project
since you refused to sleep with him) .
De Kooning made you hideous,
a matriarchal monster
from a schizophrenic's nightmare:
Warhol silk-screened you in boredom.
It took Lucien Freud
to do you justice; nose
to a flower, dark eyes
depthless, Hebraic.