His hobby was reading people. Some people wondered why he would sit with a young girl, a model or one of his grandchildren and not speak much. It was because his eyes were swivelling round reading peopleās movements and looks. It was what he did professionally,ā said Doherty.
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He could take major events or small episodes from daily life and shade or exaggerate things in such a way as to capture their shape and substance, capture what life felt like in the society in which he and his friends lived and worked and bred. People looked to him to put into words what was going on.
But while in the early days his opinions would swing wildly and his delivery could be abrupt, he became more articulate and observant of peopleās feelings as time went on. He learned to read the room, demonstrating skills that, years earlier, I didnāt think he had. Some people have said that he got mellower with age, but I donāt think thatās an adequate description of what happened; it sounds too passive, as if he just was letting more go. Steveās transformation was an active one. He continued to engage; he just changed the way he went about it.
He made most things sound or seem less ordinary, be it the cut or shape of a lapel, or his thoughts on love, or even spinach: āI can imagine that if a woman I was in love with cooked spinach with oil, I would also enjoy the slight heroism of liking it, although I didnāt usually enjoy it served that way.
He was on the threshold of his ādisturbingā or āhallucinatoryā period, which led Herbert Read, the critic and co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, to describe him as āthe Ingres of existentialismā. It was a compliment that Lucian enjoyed, Ingres being one of the painters he most admired.
It seems inevitable that people who canāt read are going to lean more toward judging candidates on the way they look and sound than on what they claim they stand for. Even people who can read and are educated are apt to pay more attention to good looks and seductive lies than they should.