Art: Lucian Freud – Portraits

Lucian Freud does not spare feet. Or penises. Or ribs.These are parts of the body that are often fetishised but they are also, frankly, ugly parts of the body, and Freud does not spare them. They are very much there and they are very much as they are, no airbrushing or sentimentalising fantasy involved.

In his essay ‘Freud from America’, Michael Auping, Chief Curator of the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, writes of the discomfort Freud’s portraits stirred in American breasts during the eighties. Freud’s earlier works, from the forties and fifties, were created during a period where America was obsessing over the Avant Garde and had taken abstract expressionism to its extremes. Freud, with his realistic portraits of friends and family, just as he sees them, was somewhat baffling, even worrying: as Auping writes, “His conservatism expressed its own radicalism.”

More than this, the honest depictions of flesh – blemishes, spots, rolls and all – were at odds with what Auping describes as “the America of photoshop, the America of airbrushing, the America of no wrinkles”. American portraiture, such as it is, has been characterised by a flatness and distance, people seen from without (Edward Hopper, for example). The powerful intimacy and honesty of Freud’s portraits arrived as an antithesis to this.

Lucian Freud: Portraits has been intelligently curated by Sarah Howgate. It spans seven decades of the artist’s work and is essentially chronological. Consequently, it is less of an exhibition than, in Howgate’s words, “a life in paint”. The autobiographical nature of Freud’s subjects contributes to this: he rarely accepted commissions but would “combine my painting with the people that came into my life”.

It is advised that you begin at the beginning and walk through to the end so you can see his style developing. Then walk back. His earlier works are separated from the more famous later ones by a corridor framed on one side by nudes and on the other by suited men, making a strange walkway of opposing shade and light.

The most interesting change in Freud’s style happens during the fifties and can be experienced directly through the beautiful but faintly worrying painting, ‘Hotel Bedroom’. This was the last portrait Freud painted sitting down at an easel. From then on, he stood up (a wonderful metaphor for his newfound boldness) to create his work, helping him to develop a more vigorous style compared to the finer and more vulnerable work that had come before. It was also about this time that he began to use coarser hog’s hair brushes, giving his paintings that distinctive Freudian thickness.

In the past, I have looked at Freud’s nudes and been, despite admiration for an extraordinary craftsman, disgusted. It is easy to be disgusted. We are now no longer used to seeing the body as it is. The infamous portraits of ‘Big Sue’ Tilley (of which four are on show) have her bloated figure proudly displayed, genitalia with pubic hair intact often on show. No wonder we double take. For us, instead, the pornographic shine of a plastic upper thigh or the retouched to silky-smooth wasteland of a woman’s waxed crotch.

Now, however, having spent two hours wandering around in this celebration of skin, I feel differently. A celebration is what it is. Once you get your preconceived ideas about the human form out of your head, you can begin to engage with Freud’s enjoyment of and joy in flesh. As the artist himself said of the nude, “It is the most complete portrait.”

When our viewpoint is close to the subject, they are grounded, drawing you into the painting with certainty and strength. When Freud distances the eye to include backgrounds and interiors, there is a strange sense of agoraphobia. Things (beds, chairs) appear at angles, they don’t seem to quite connect to the floor, you feel as though the subjects are lost within their space, as though they are going to slide and slip away. Examples of this are ‘Evening in the Studio’, a ‘Big Sue’ painting, and ‘Naked Portrait’, a room made odder for the inclusion of a wall behind which you cannot see.

Despite his (later) works being characterised by an aggressive pasted brushstroke, they are deeply sensitive, and for their sensitivity, deeply psychological, thoughtful and moving. If there is something ‘ugly’ about the subject (a wrinkled, red scrotum, for example, hanging over a thigh like a Dali clock) then it will be ‘ugly’ in the painting. This honesty demands respect.

Some of the most touching works are portraits of his mother, Lucie. Freud is again situating himself in a more ‘conservative’ tradition; artists rarely use their mothers as subjects these days. Other works that should certainly not be missed are: the early paintings of Kitty Garman, his first wife, painted “knee to knee and part by part” with what Freud described as a “visually aggressive” technique; the late ‘Bella’, a strange lonely chair portrait in black, with the floor beneath her feet a wash of wood; the ‘Pregnant Girl’ and ‘Baby on a Green Sofa’, two beautiful portraits side by side where the figures a like innocence, glowing white on dark backgrounds, asleep, unsuspecting and very very human.

This is a fascinating and fantastic exhibition. Go once, go twice, go again. It is like having a conversation with the artist, albeit a one-sided one, where he talks and takes you through his life, right up to the moment of his death with the ‘Portrait of the Hound’, left unfinished on his easel.

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