Benefits Supervisor (“Big Sue”) Resting
“There are facts,” the painter Lucian Freud once said, “and there is the truth.” The current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London follows less than a year after Freud’s death at 88. The show is a stark reminder that while Freud dealt with the facts of our all-too-human flesh, his primary concern is the truth that his artistic vision uncovers, probes and delineates.
In many ways the show is overwhelming. The work displayed spans most of his career, and I was reminded how rare it is to see an artist who has spent a lifetime plumbing one particular métier. Seeing those early portraits in context helped me better understand the trajectory of his evolution as a portrait visionary. And while portraiture has never been a form I have been drawn to, this show left its mark on me. Flesh, whether rendered by Freud or by Jenny Saville, is deliciously seductive to the painter’s eye. And both have painted it in profusion.
In a recent review of a Renaissance portrait exhibit (at the Bode in Berlin before coming to the Metropolitan Museum) in the New York Review of Books, Andrew Butterfield‘s exploration into the history of portraiture tracks its evolution in Western art traditions. That show’s curators state that the goal of portraiture was to “‘confer a distinct identity on a subject—as a husband or wife, merchant or intellectual, military commander, civic office holder or prince.’ Portraiture was a matter of both description and aspiration; it sought to capture the likeness of a particular man or woman and simultaneously to suggest how that person exemplified a type or ideal.” Over the course of the several hundred years, portraits moved from appearance and aspiration to reveal a “range of emotion and depth of feelings never before shown in European portraiture.”
From Andrew Graham-Dixon‘s review in the Telegraph:
Stylistically, Freud might be said to have begun at one end of the spectrum of Western painting and moved towards the other – from Van Eyck towards the later, more painterly likes of Rembrandt and Velazquez.
Gradually he became more interested in flesh and less in the gaze alone. There is an element of conscious contrivance about many of the later portraits, which focus so closely on the mute, mortal bodies of those who submitted to his many months of sitting…Men and women, huge and emaciated, are arranged in splayed or pole-axed poses, like ancient Christian martyrs. Yet the milieu is always the same mundane painter’s studio: a place which, with its small quota of never-changing props (the iron-framed bed, bulging sofa, pile of painter’s rags), brings to mind the pared-down set of Waiting for Godot.
Life, these pictures imply, is a waiting-room for death. Sometimes the light plays tricks but the truth will always out. In the final room, one bearded model, vulnerable and naked as a Man of Sorrows, resembles a modern Christ. Of course he is no such thing, just a man posing on some bare West London floorboards.
The border between enchantment and disenchantment is always breached. There are traces here of the magical, the mysterious, the uncanny, but there are no actual miracles – save, perhaps, the miracle of each individual’s inimitable, human presence.
That last line is a good encapsulation of my response to the show. There ARE traces of the magical here, but there are no miracles.
Okay, here goes with my dissenting opinion: Freud is one of those artists whose work began by moving me deeply and ended by leaving me cold. For me, I see less truth in the late work than an artist making pictures that are so over the top in the people he chose to paint and in the slashing of paint that he seems to be producing parodies of his great mid-period works. In the early and middle works, I get a sense of an eye deeply probing form and feeling; the late works just look lazy to me, the paint no longer expressively delineating form with sensitive yet vigorous touch and color; the subjects are sensationalistic. (but then, I don’t like Francis Bacon either.)
I’m Altoon here. I think Freud lost his way. Perhaps it was a side effect of fame. But the tenderness and clear eyed appreciation of his models somehow evaporated in the later works. Toward the end of his career he seems to be self consciously imitating himself. As though eloquence somehow transmuted into melodrama.
But, oh, the early work! Even the juvenalia. And his prints…
I have never been a fan of Freud, so finally having the chance to spend time really looking at his work was a valuable experience. But after all that, I would still not call myself a fan. Yes, I better understand the arc of his work, the gifts he possessed early on for capturing something quite personal, vulnerable and revelatory in his subjects. It still misses some quality I look for in a work of art. Given the long lines to get in to the exhibit and the glowing reviews, I am in the minority on that one.
Later that week, I flagged a taxi for the Whitechapel Gallery. The taxidriver perked up when she heard my destination. In that cheerful British way she turned to me and said, “I just love art! It is so subjective.”
Best line from a cabbie I’ve ever heard.
The article on Freud in Vanity fair tells of him fathering 14 children from 6 different women, developing attachments only to the children that eventually modeled for him. I think there is a coarseness with his latter nudes (the only ones I’ve seen) that I don’t associate with that genre of painting. If that is “truth” then I prefer nudes with a little magic.
Are his fan’s concerned with his rather weighted subjects? Renoir has the same gift later on his life…he chose larger women than those that are considered socially acceptable.