I’ve taken an interest in Lucian Freud’s painting for a long time, and visited his recent exhibition in the National Gallery, in London. It was an impressively comprehensive retrospective survey of his work, and I decided to buy the catalogue and collection of essays that marked the occasion. Yesterday evening I managed to finish reading the various critical essays.* My understanding of Freud has not been altered in this process, but it has certainly firmed up and clarified the way I look at his painting.
I have to admit that I am completely ambivalent about the man. On the positive side I recognise that he is an impressive handler of paint; that some of his portraits are truly notable; and he has sustained a consistently high standard over a very long period. On the other hand there is definitely something very strange going on there in connection with power. I can’t escape the feeling that in most of his work he comes over as dominating his subjects. He is recording their vulnerability, their defencelessness, in the face of his gaze. It is instructive that he never referred to his subjects as “nude”. They were, to him, “naked” …. and that is a very significant distinction, semantically speaking. Time after time he records the extreme vulnerability of the people who model for him. I think that this is underlined as much as anything else by his choice usually to pose his subjects with their genitals in full view.
There is another side to the story, and that is the fact that when he is painting subjects who themselves embody power, this is the aspect of them on which his attention is focussed. I was intrigued, in this respect, by his controversial portrait of Queen Elizabeth, which emphasises her authority. This lady is not to be messed with!
It is a sad fact that, of all the studies he did of members of his family (and his occasional lovers) there is no trace of real affection …. with the possible exception of the portrait of his mother after her death. (That one really did resonate with me, having attempted a similar artistic response to the death of my own mother.)
I can’t help but ask myself what his famous grandfather might have made of him.
*Having a bad cold does have its advantages, in that sitting in a warm room and reading suddenly becomes quite legitimate.