Lucian Freud rebooted
Lucian Freud is so famous for the brilliant distinction of his portraits that looking at his works afresh, untrammelled by renowned family and racy personal life, is probably impossible. But commendably, the National Gallery successfully offers a version of it in a sort of clean-lined Freud reboot. Essentially chronological, this marvellous show only includes paintings by Freud, rather than “contextualising” the work via a few others’ paintings — and only divides into five themed rooms. The captions, alongside title and date, principally draw attention to brush strokes and even brush types, plus here and there adding additional information — for example, that some paintings are compositions where the featured sitters never actually met, or, as in the case of the massive Large Interior, Notting Hill (1993), Freud’s assistant sat for the figure of woman holding a baby because the intended sitter was late and the artist wanted to start. Beyond this, the usual big room boards give key biographical information.
Lucian Freud: Large Interior, Notting Hill, 1998. Private collection. © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2022 / Bridgeman Images
Freud was born in 1922 in Berlin, the second of three boys, and the favourite grandson of world-famous Sigmund Freud. In 1933, in response to the rapidly escalating antisemitic violence of Nazi Germany, the family escaped to London. Lucian’s home life in Berlin had been artistic and intellectual and he was a naturally gifted artist. In England, following spells at various schools, including Dedham in East Suffolk where he learned from (and, as a teen, briefly emulated) Cedric Morris, he ended up at Goldsmiths’ College in London. His own artistic connections plus familial connections and dramatic good looks made it possible to move in any social circle. Who would not want a captivating, intelligent, talented, handsome young person with mesmerising eyes at their party? No wonder people fell for him all his life. But nothing stopped him painting. What this refreshing exhibition displays so well is a lifelong commitment to figurative painting, principally portraits, from a very early age (he died in 2011).
Lucian Freud: Self-portrait, 1939. Private collection. © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2022/ Bridgeman Images
The earliest on show is Self Portrait (1939), a small self-portrait, in a slightly Cedric-Morris style, done at 18. The face is broad and odd, resembling Henry VIII more than Freud. It doesn’t seem especially promising, rather unsure of itself. Which fleeting impression vanishes, never to return, following a series of self-portraits such as Man with a Feather (1943) done at 21, and Self Portrait with Hyacinth Pot done at 26.
Lucian Freud: Self-portrait with Hyacinth Pot, 1947-8. Pencil and crayon Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. Wilson Gift through The Art Fund 2006. © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2022 / Bridgeman Images
Like many youthful self-portraits the faces appear doubting, questioning, and egotistical — but unlike so many, the certainty of the hand; the confidence, whether in oil or in detailed crayon, pencil or ink, is devastating. Stylised, yes; but winging through styles with assurance and ease as if running through a rolodex of historical portrait styles for the hell of it. Large, compelling eyes unite these youthful images. Hard eyes. Take those of Girl with a Kitten (1947), the mesmeric kitten more strangled than petted. But look too at the fineness of the draughting, the paint-work set within immaculate, fine lines to a high, smooth finish, the hair stranded with wiry Renaissance exactitude. And he’s not even showing off.
Lucian Freud: Girl with a Kitten, 1947. Tate: Bequeathed by Simon Sainsbury 2006, accessioned 2008. © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2022 / photo Tate
As time passes the canvases get larger, while not yet the monumental scale of the late nudes. Freud continued to explore, always stylistically and technically moving and changing, always enlarging in scope. From the thinly painted exactitude of youth his brushstroke evolved to meet scale, with looser, more vigorous painting concentrating more and more on the evocation of flesh, but also of highly physical fabric: clothes, bed sheets, sofas or floorboards. Amid this progression are two remarkable paintings in a deliberately ‘unfinished’ (in truth highly finished) style — the Renaissance technique of “Non Finito”, whose carefully selected margin of non-finishing frames and spotlights what is intended to be looked at: Self Portrait (Fragment) (1956), a head of Freud; and Francis Bacon (Unfinished) (1956-7), of his painter-friend. Helpfully side by side, they show Freud aged 35, already at the top of a game that would go on for five decades, creating larger and larger works with the energy of a teenager. Now the eyes are a normal size; the faces and hair modelled with confident films of starkly contrasted colours. Bacon’s in particular is a triumph of modelling, instantly recognisable, defining. It’s superb.
Lucian Freud: Self-portrait (Fragment), 1956. Private collection. © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2022/ Bridgeman Images
Lucian Freud: Francis Bacon (Unfinished), 1956-7: Lent by Ananda Foundation N.V. © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2022 / Bridgeman Images
Just before these, Hotel Bedroom (1954), a large painting of the artist with his then wife Caroline Blackwood in an unflattering impression of a beautiful woman, from 1954, explains in Freud’s own words that he considered this the last painting he sat down to paint. Afterwards, he stood and/or moved about. It’s not necessarily the case that the two ‘unfinished’ works above were done standing, though they may have been. But after them, the ability to move around freely added another dimension to the works on show, some of which appear done from an almost aerial position, like an eagle flying above naked bodies on bed, floor or sofa; zooming across a room to distort perspective, sometimes descending to peck rapidly at the surface of the paint like a seagull, raising the surface like coarse sand, as in Two Men (1987-8), or the wonderful Self-Portrait, Reflection of 2002.
Lucian Freud: Self-portrait (Reflection), 2002. Private collection. © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2022/ Bridgeman Images
The exhibition allows one to appreciate at close quarters Freud’s handling of flesh. His palette was fairly consistent, using assured sweeps of colour to indicate muscle masses, shadows, or veins, his placement so good that our brain does the rest, making absolute reality and soft flesh. Sometimes, as in the case of Lord Jacob Rothschild’s clasped hands against his elegantly trousered lap in Man in a Chair (Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild) a portrait from 1989, the strong fingers are, here and there, outlined tidily with a burnt-umberish red-brown. Wonderful, veined hands where otherwise the brush marks do not end tidily, whether on finger or shirt- or jacket-cuff; but the colours, including swift areas of fresh cadmium pink, are so perfectly judged that our eye presses hem and cuff, rounds buttons, sees vein and tendon as if to the life.
DETAIL of Lucian Freud: Man in a Chair (Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild). On show at the National Gallery. Photo © Philippa Stockley
And again, in Naked Portrait II (1987-89), a resting hand done with speed and brio on a thigh manufactured from wide, fast brush strokes: here, rather than thin defining lines used where needed, it is the use of a very precise shadow, set visually beneath the hand — again in brownish red — whose sharp-edged definition makes the thigh at once silky and smooth.
The final painting to my mind (though not chronologically) is the artist’s justly famous self-portrait Painter Working, Reflection (1993) standing naked in memorably unlaced boots, a palette knife mid-air. The painter stripped of all but necessity, painting himself at last as he did so many others, stripped of all but what Freud made their necessity, their essence, as it would always afterwards appear to the viewer. Done with the same terrifying ease.
Lucian Freud: Painter Working, Reflection, 1993: The Newhouse Collection
© The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2022 / Bridgeman Images
What a journey crammed into these few rooms; what an exposition of genius and explosion of talent. Such controlled talent. Which talent, the painting seems to say, was all he came into the world with and, despite laurels and honours, would leave with — but so well used.
The Credit Suisse Exhibition Lucian Freud: New Perspectives
Until 22 January 2023 The National Gallery, London
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