Girl with a Kitten
(Picture: AFP via Getty Images)How do you find a new angle on an artist as familiar as Lucian Freud? He’s been the subject of endless shows, not least at Tate Liverpool last year and the Royal Academy in 2019, the same year that a long-awaited biography was published. Can we ever really see him in a new light? What more is there to say?
Quite a lot, it turns out. The new perspectives the National Gallery promises in its title are an attempt to unshackle him from what have become orthodox viewpoints, to wrestle him free from established legend. You know the one: the cruel, maverick genius with the famous name and the unflinching eye.
The curator, Daniel Herrmann, relates it to the mythical “hero’s journey” narrative. He’s set himself a tricky task, partly because the myth and the biography are so compelling, and because the most prominent interpretations of his work have been those of his biographers. So this time, the show is light on the details of the sitters and their relationship with Freud. We’re forced to look at the paintings on their own terms: a person in a space with some things, painted in a certain way and from a particular angle.
And then you have the context, that most unforgiving of lights by which to see contemporary painters: the National Gallery. There are no Old Masters in the show, but beyond the exhibition, Freud is surrounded by some of the greatest works of art ever made. It’s not as if he’s separated from them, down in the Sainsbury Wing basement, either: he’s in the heart of the collection, in the grand upstairs spaces. Within seconds, you can be looking at the artists he revered, like Titian to Rembrandt.
It’s an illuminating way to see his work, and not to Freud’s benefit. More than anything else, his paintings seem wracked with more uncertainty and doubt than I had previously spotted. He suggests as much in the quote that prefaces the show: “I use the gallery as if it were a doctor,” Freud said. “I come for ideas and help – to look at situations within paintings, rather than whole paintings. Often these situations have to do with arms and legs, so the medical analogy is actually right.” Still, I think, many paintings here need major surgery.
The show begins fairly conventionally, with the folkish early Forties paintings. Freud’s paint at this stage was deliberately crude, in short thick marks, until a turning-point picture, Man with a Feather (Self-Portrait) from 1943, where Freud’s faux-naive narrative style remains, but he thins the oil so that its descriptive powers are enhanced. This more sensitive application led to a body of work that fills the show’s best room: the paintings made between the mid-Forties and Fifties. Here, Freud combines a sensitive painting style that looks almost like the tempera paintings of the early Renaissance, together with an sharp focus on his sitters – to spellbinding effect.
In Girl with a Kitten (1947), the poor cat seems on the brink of having its neck wrung, yet meets our gaze (unlike the woman) with a knowing calm. What a deeply strange picture. In Man with a Thistle (1946), Freud himself is the subject, looking at us from the back of the painting across the thistle, which looks at once like it’s made of paper and like it’s an instrument of torture. The trio of paintings of Caroline Blackwood, Freud’s first wife (sometimes it’s impossible to avoid biography) are the summit of this style: delicate, yet almost brutal in their emotional power.
In the last of the three, Hotel Bedroom, Freud pictures himself standing, brooding in the shadows, looking over a bed where an apparently anxious Blackwood lies – a tragic image of mutual isolation. Freud apparently saw the painting as a watershed because, ironically, it was “the last painting where I was sitting down [to paint]: when I stood up, I never sat down again”.
It’s too neat to say that’s where the problems start, but immediately as we enter the next room, the paintings lose their consistency and never regain it. Partly, that’s because from there, the show gets more thematic – subjects include intimacy, power and flesh – and paintings from multiple decades are mixed in. But as well as standing up, Freud began working with thicker paint, and with thickness came a heaviness and bluntness absent from the Fifties pictures.
In the Sixties paintings, with a few exceptions – two intense paintings of women in fur coats from the late 1960s, where the impasto ushers in a stirring liveliness – the greater expressiveness of the paint leads to a diminished characterisation of the subject.
If anything, the problem deepens with time. Thick oil should signify urgency, but as Freud draws and re-draws his sitters, he leaves coarse vestiges of mis-steps that interrupt the surface, making it dry, lumpy and overworked.I’ve seen this tendency compared to Alberto Giacometti’s densely worked sculptures and paintings, but Freud’s clotted paint doesn’t resolve into a convincing form as the Italian’s materials do so miraculously.
It’s curious, because we’re told Freud loved paint, and loved his forebears who used its expressive potential to evoke the sensuality of flesh. But I’m struck by how inert it so often appears here. You see it time and again as he goes on – in the face of his daughter Bella in Bella and Esther (1988); around the naked figure in Two Men (1987-88); on his own face in Self-Portrait Reflection (2002); and in Profile Donegal Man (2008).
The latter painting is one of cluster of portraits of greyish men that are often overlooked amid his other work, and for good reason – they’re unspeakably boring.
One Freud orthodoxy I agree with is that the later work reached a summit in the early 1990s with the paintings of the performance artist Leigh Bowery and of his friend Sue Tilley, the benefits supervisor. It’s a pity, then, that there are not more Bowery paintings here – just one, but a cracker – And the Bridegroom (1993), in which he lies naked on a bed with Nicola, his sidekick.
Freud is at his best when at his most stark, his most objective, not forcing narrative or imagination into the pictures. It’s a shame too that those featuring Big Sue aren’t the strongest. Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1996) has great passages – in the titular textile in the background, for instance – but Tilley’s body, particularly her stomach, is unconvincingly rendered.
Another famous picture from this period is Freud’s self-portrait, naked but for boots, palette in hand; another work where the overwrought painting of the face undermines the rest of the picture. Curiously, the best passage of painting here is on the palette, where Freud seems freer, unencumbered by the need to get things right.
It happens throughout the show – marvellous incidental details like the perfectly rendered torn sofa and paint-stained smock in Painter and Model (1986-87) and the embroidered blanket in Evening in the Studio (1993). Seeing Freud here in the National Gallery made me think how much that need to seek help from the masters undid his best work – perhaps he was so intent on matching them, on getting those arms and legs right that it restricted rather than freed him.
I emerged from this show finding him no less fascinating but in no doubt that he was not a genius, not even a great artist, but an uneven painter – occasionally wonderful, often very ordinary.
