Lucian Freud’s forensic brushwork

Associated media

Eleanor Robbins reports on the retrospective at London's National Portrait Gallery

The opening of Lucian Freud Portraits in London was proclaimed by huge publicity at a time when all museums and galleries are victims of government austerity measures and diminishing returns and when there is a hunger for excitement and celebrity, a kind of escape from the tedium of a long, dull winter. It is a time when all the big galleries are showing their first exhibition of the year (this one is a blockbuster).  Weeks before the opening at the National Portrait Gallery, the publicity machines were hard at work drumming up interest in Freud’s latest (and notorious) works, including one painting on which he was working, but left unfinished on the easel, just before he died in July last year.

There were about 130 paintings and drawings shown and some further etchings covering a long career from the 1940s to the present.  Many, but not all, of the works would be familiar to many people because the artist has enjoyed excessive exposure both in exhibitions and in the press for many years. Freud has usually been considered a great painter of extraordinary skill and determination and some even regarded him as ‘the world’s greatest (living) figurative painter’. 

With this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, we can investigate all aspects of his career.  The catalogue allows us to examine the artist’s easy mannerisms and confident brush handling as well as the somewhat startling lack of interest in an expressive potential of light. We cannot help but feel that sometimes the painter’s sitters have become willing victims for his ‘forensic’ brushwork, clearly shown in the illustrations, but few of them engage with him (or with the viewer); they appear locked within themselves, frozen. 

Freud’s preference for a high viewpoint looking down at his sitter adds to the persistent thought that these portraits are more like laboratory investigations than revelations of a temperament or character.  The viewer is constantly made aware of the intensity of the painter’s gaze when he looked so fiercely at his models in order to record every inch of the surfaces for a later translation into paint.  There is much determination and hard work in evidence, but no obvious joy or delight, except in the various textures of the medium and the pleasures of its application.

Freud’s portraits of his mother are more sympathetically worked than any of his other portraits; in these he shows a real understanding of the awful futility and imprisonment of old age.  After his father died in 1970, his mother fell into a depression and Lucian used her as his model, ‘I started painting her’, he says, ’because she had lost interest in everything, including me’. He did it also to cheer her up and give her something to do. There are three or four paintings of his mother, the last done in 1982–4 five years before she died, and a drawing completed after her death. 

The last painting shows her, dressed in white, lying on an iron bedstead placed tight against a wall.  The space is compressed, a window shade pulled down, she gazes blankly above and into the distance. We note also from Freud’s drawings of his parents illustrated here that his marks are delicate, strangely Cézanne-like, with some cross-hatching but in the main using sweeping, repeated lines expressing the bony structures and soft forms of the flesh and skull.      

The portraits of the 1970s reveal Freud’s outstanding facility in determining the planes and hollows of heads and faces.  The ridges of the nose (apparently the painter’s initial marks), then cheekbones and foreheads are the forms expressed in confident brushstrokes that catch the light first. In the next decade these smooth and sweeping painted surfaces gradually give way to drier, grittier dabbings of pigment. One critic found Freud’s handling of paint at this stage ‘encrusted…scabby…and [having] ultimately pointless piled-on paint’. Freud’s late work is considered by some to be ruthlessly ugly and formulaic; the paintings from the last two decades of his life have attracted critics and writers alike.  Even the American writer/poet John Updike, after seeing Freud’s paintings in 2005, wrote ‘flesh drags us down, its mottled earth the painter’s avid ground…poor nakedness, sunk angel, sack of phlegm…’  (‘Endpoint’ from the poem ‘Lucian Freud’).

The catalogue is exceptionally fine (and expensive) and contains all the things necessary for a good reference work including a full chronology complete with many photographs of the artist taken by friends and sitters, and a bibliographical section of exhibition catalogues, articles and even some pieces by the artist himself.  Two additions to the usual format for a really good catalogue like this are especially interesting: an essay on Freud’s work seen from an American perspective and an interview with the artist.  Both are written by Michael Auling, the director of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, where the exhibition will be shown later on this year.

Freud’s last big retrospective of 1987 in Washington turned out to be a shock for American viewers used to the remote or isolated figures of Hopper or Wyeth (sentimental/symbolic), or seen in a Pop Art context (Warhol) or, heavily dependent on photographs, painted in a forceful, Hyperrealist  style.  Freud’s more visceral depictions, where the intricacies of the flesh are bold and the distance between viewer and sitter are compressed, will certainly have a huge impact on viewers new to Freud’s painting.  Once, when the painter was asked whether he thought his paintings would be a success in the US, he said, ‘I liked America when I visited…I used to wonder if they liked my paintings’.

Lucian Freud Portraits  by Sarah Howgate with Michael Auping and John Richardson is published by the National Portrait Gallery, London, 2012. 256 pp., Fully illustrated, £35.00. ISBN 978 1 85514 442 2