Last night I went to see the Lucian Freud exhibition in the Irish
Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. I.M.M.A. is housing 50 of his
paintings and twenty of his etchings and drawings until September - it
is a must see show. To say that I was hyperactive with excitement
before hand is an understatement. Although I have seen isolated
paintings by Freud in group shows - I had never before now seen any in
quantity. Of the many artists who have influenced my own art (Picasso,
Basquait, van Gogh, Schiele, Gerstl, Schnabel, de Kooning, Rembrandt,
Goya, Baselitz, Bacon and Salle) Freud was the last painter I had yet
to see in a major retrospective. To say that my expectations were met
is to put it mildly.
My infatuation with Freud began in early 1992 - at a time when I was
executing a couple of life paintings in N.C.A.D. during the Easter and
Summer holidays. As a clumsy student - struggling to deal with the
difficulties of life drawing and painting - I looked in awe at Freud's
work - which because of their strange realist modernity effected me so
much more deeply than any other painter of the figure. I also
identified with Freud's somewhat naive and self-taught approach to
life-painting.
Although there is no doubt that Freud's work is riddled with the
mannerism and naive mistakes of the largely self-taught (he had some
art training in his teens but nothing like the systematic drilling the
old masters had to endure in order to achieve mastery) - his work has
genuine integrity - something distinctly lacking in the modern art
world. He is also one of those rare artists like Courbet, Cezanne, van
Gogh, Picasso and De Kooning whose awkwardness is compelling, heart-
rending and honest.
Artists in the West since Raphael in the 1500's until Courbet in the
late nineteenth century painted not only an idealized version of the
**** - they typically painted the figure only as a prop in a larger
visual story. Although western art has had its fair share of ***y
****s - typically the figure was not painted **** in order to arouse
***ual desire or even to anaylise character - instead the **** was
used as an expressive character in a visual play. The breaking point
in this tradition I would date to Gustave Courbet's 'The Origin of The
World' (1866) - an immaculately painted oil of a woman's lower torso -
the bushy vagina at its center. But it was not until the turn of the
twentieth century that artists like Lovis Corinth, Richard Gerstl,
Egon Schiele, Max Beckman and Otto Dix turned the body into a
psychological and psychological revealer of subjective truth - and it
is by these artists that Freud should be judged - he is part of their
unofficial Expressionist/Realist school. This should come as no
surprise - he was born and lived in Berlin till the age of eleven -
this was his cultural heritage. But what England gave him was a sense
of restraint and Conservative order.
In a world of noisy attention seeking loudmouths - Freud's reclusive
silence speaks volumes. It is telling that in a world were simpletons
want to tell you everything about themselves - none of which matters a
dam - a man like Freud keeps his council (some of my readers might
wish I would do the same). This is part of his aristocratic baring
(many of his closest friends are from the English Gentry). Nagging
Feminist's who seek to attack him as a misogynist take great pains to
tell of his philandering, his suspected 40 illegitimate children and
his cruel abandonment of ex-lovers. I would simply ask these women
this: Do you really think I or any other male painter admires Freud
because of his personal life? I can answer absolutely not! I admire
Freud for one reason and one bloody simple reason only - his
paintings! Personally I find attacks on Freud's supposed misogyny and
misanthropy childish, simplistic and ignorant. Frankly my answer would
be so what if he is! He speaks his version of truth and that should be
good enough. From what I can see - he is as unflattering to men as he
is to women. In a world of airbrushed photographs of super models -
Freud's paintings are like a kick in the face to a culture of lies
about the body and humanity.
Today in ****ography the tradition of Raphael lives on in the high
budget, slick, and never anything but beautiful **** of L.A. But one
only has to look at the home videos of amateur **** stars to see both
the real world and the world of Freud - deathly pale or sunburned,
stick thin or obsess and ugly bodies of both great humanity and
repulsive imperfection. It was Freud's grandfather Sigmund Freud who
changed our conception of self-hood more than any other thinker in
western history - so it should come as no surprise that Lucian Freud
should have gone on to paint the human face and figure in a way almost
unseen in art before.
Most of Freud's large paintings take up to a year to paint and he
works on a number of canvases at a time. He paints almost exclusively
from life. Posing for him is along and sometimes arduous experience.
The vast majority of his models are friends, lovers or family. He has
painted at least three of his daughters ****d - but I will leave it to
others to discern the 'Electra Complex' implications of that! During
breaks he treats his sitters to champagne and pheasant and his is
known as a great conversationalist. Like his great friend Francis
Bacon he loves to gamble. Those who know him speak of his charisma and
energy.
Critics like Andrew Graham Dixon and Brian Sewell have stated that
Freud - although a great realist painter - is not up to the standards
of old masters like Velazquez, Ruben's and Rembrandt - I am sorry I
disagree. I think at their best - Freud's canvases are as good as
anything ever painted. Technically he maybe clumsy and willful in a
way those old masters seldom were - but in our era he is unique. While
It is true to say that his working methods and ethos is very different
from the methods of the old masters - that does not mean his work is
any less compelling.
In our time, Freud has become the standard barer of the realist
tradition. This is in part to due to his genius and in part because
the tradition is so utterly bankrupt. The trouble with 95% of all the
realist art produced world wide - is its triviality, crassness and
historical nostalgia. I seriously think that most of these
'traditional' painters are stunned personalities who would like to
retreat into some kind of fantasy they have about a Utopian age of
representational art. They are the same kind of people who build model
railways and embroider quilts - insular, timid and deluded. Freud on
the other hand has no such delusions. He is a fully formed
personality, intellect and practitioner. Most of these pseudo-old-
masters - are terrified of the ugly or strident or obsessive. So their
work is fit for nothing but the top of a biscuit tin. Freud on the
other hand embraces the ugly - and makes it look beautiful - the sign
of a truly great artist in my opinion.
I am less interested in Freud's early paintings from the 1940's to the
1960's, and I consider the high point of his art to be from the late
1970's to the present day - as his brushes got broader and his paint
thicker. However these early painting explain his late masterpieces.
>From the outset he was obsessed with the eyes of his sitters - indeed
has anyone ever made eyes look so hypnotic? From the outset he was
fond of using a stippling of lines to define the form. From the
beginning he worked on a white canvas - allowing it to gleam through
the thinly spread paint. From the outset he had a knowing ability to
give hyper details to certain parts of the subject - while treating
other parts more general way. However he always knew how to marry the
parts to the whole - in a way that has always escaped me in my own
work. He is a master of detail - yet never in the annoying crotchety
way that other realists are. His detail is never anything less than
visceral and exciting. I am less fond of Freud's drawings and
etchings. However they do give some im****tant clues to his art. In
their way, his drawings have echos of Durer's woodcuts. Like Durer -
Freud uses very dark and strong lines to shape the volumes of flesh.
Freud's technique in his late work is nothing short of magnificent.
This is real painting! Look at how bold and confident his brush work
is! Look at how he goes for it with every brushstroke! There is no
mistaking that a man painted these paintings. They have a fierce
muscularity and vigor utterly lacking in the flabby and academic work
of imitators like Jenny Saville, Celia Paul (an ex-lover of Freud's),
Tai-Shan and an army of art student plagiarizers.
The masterpiece of the exhibition for me was his large canvas 'Two
Plants' 1977-80 - it is quite simply unbelievable! From a distance it
looks like a photograph - but up close it is a thickly painted nest of
paint. Each single leaf in this tangle of plants is recorded in all
its individuality - he does not use any formula. This painting and
others he has made of foliage recall Durer's famous watercolour of a
piece of turf.
Critics have carped that Freud's paintings are all browns and grays!
Are these people blind? Yes from a distance they can look brown and
gray - but get up close - it's a fireworks display of pinks, blues,
mauve's, purples, olives, tan, cream, white, apple green, peach, plum
and so on. It is a mark of his genius for colour that he can embed in
his flesh tones such bright colours and yet fit them all in to a
realistic whole. Another remarkable quality of his late paintings is
his use of thick impasto. One of the problems of using thick paint is
that it reduces the artists ability to produce subtle effects of line
and texture - but Freud manages it. His impasto is precise, firm and
solid. He not only paints his figures - he sculpts them out of paint!
I have never seen paint dry-brushed on with the loaded brush with such
finesse and accuracy.
Freud's art is a total rebuke to the corrupted nature of today's art
world. Can anyone honestly tell me that there is more depth and power
in; Barnett Newman's zips, Frank Stella's stripes, Andy Warhol's candy
coloured silkscreen ****traits, Robert Ryman's all white canvases,
Joseph Beuys' felt and fat, Gerhard Richter's photo-realist blurred
canvases, Donald Judd's steel boxes, Joesph Kosuth's definitions of
words, Cindy Sherman's photos, Jeff's Koons' kitsch ****celains, Damien
Hirst's spot paintings, or Tracey Emin's unmade bed! Frankly to my
mind all that rubbish and so much more like it is exposed in an
exhibition like this to be an utter fraud perpetrated by self-deluded
morons with more salesman****p and skill in 'art-bollocks' than any
actual creative vision, craft, skill, discipline or intelligence. May
this old master live a long and productive life!
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