The second exhibition I visited during my recent trip to London was the Lucien Freud show at the National Gallery. It was a curious experience not the least because I ended up having to revise quite considerably my estimation of his work.
I have always been an admirer of Freud, and I think that the principle reason for that was my respect for his capacity for close observation. While not abandoning that approach to his painting, however, I found myself on this occasion attending more to his relationship to his models. There is probably nothing new in what I have to say, but this posting might be seen as an account of my own thought processes. It also high-lights the fact that it is possible to attend in quite different ways to a picture.
What I saw on this occasion was rarely anything that could be called a “portrait”, in that my understanding of the meaning of that term is that it places at the centre of attention the personality of the sitter, and perhaps also the relationship between the sitter and the artist. I don’t think that Freud does “portraits” in that sense. These are studies of naked people. In a surprising way this became evident right at the outset, with his very early works including several self-portraits. There was something odd about the eyes, in that the subject didn’t appear ever to engage directly with the viewer/artist. When I looked closely it seemed to me that the eyes in fact didn’t have a common focus, and amounted almost to a blank stare, defying the idea of a relationship between artist and subject.
In his nude studies there is no attempt to all to convey a sense of the relationship between persons. Often the sitter is asleep, or staring at something out of sight of the viewer. These are studies of objects which happen to be human forms. This becomes even more of a marked trait in his double nudes in which I found myself disagreeing with the person who had written the interpretative signs. There was a distinct absence of relationship in the psychological (as opposed to the merely physical) sense. I was startled to be told that often the two figures in the picture had never actually been co-present in the circumstances depicted. The head can be more instructive than the face, which is disconcerting. Consequently it is often the case that any sense of the meaning of the occasion is bestowed by Freud, and the sitter is totally passive in this respect …. merely an object of the painter’s attention. A consequence of this is that, although the majority of these studies are of the naked human figure, there is never (to my mind) any sense of sexuality. This is particularly telling in that we know that Freud did have sexual relationships with several of the persons he painted. For the purposes of the occasion, therefore, they might as well be Cezanne’s apples.
I shall have more to say about Freud’s relationship to his sitters tomorrow, but by curious coincidence I have to get ready to go to the life-drawing class I attend each week.