The eyes have it

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Mark White compares portraits across the centuries in London’s Savile Row and National Gallery

Paint, oil paint in particular, lets the artist represent, symbolize and almost embody the world. Even in figurative work, how the paint goes down is a much the subject as the object depicted in the painting.

Showing contemporary art next to something older is ‘on trend’ at the moment, Titian’s ‘Metamorphoses’ at the National Gallery for example. Didn’t have a spare £35.00 to see the Frieze Masters combination of the two during the Frieze art fair in London recently? There is something much smaller and free on display in Saville Row, central London until December. A meeting of six Lucian Freud portraits with three small heads by the late 16th-century Italian artist, Annibale Carracci, a clear visual link across the centuries.

All are small, focused on the head without obvious narrative intent. None of the seven people portrayed are young; paintings about experience. I would suggest that Freud’s paintings come from the experience of looking at people and Carracci’s from looking at paintings of people. Two of Carracci’s – the old men – are exquisite examples of the efficient use of paint, mid-coloured ground makes form and not a stroke is out of place in these worked-up sketches. The underlying purple against a lighter tone makes the bag under the left eye in his Portrait of a Bearded Old Man, for instance.

Freud uses heavy stranded impasto to create the same description of human ageing in his adjacent John Deakin. Deakin, the photographer, alcoholic Soho habitué and sometime friend of Bacon, Freud et al. You can see every drink, every punch that life has laid on him in Freud’s painting. In that space under his eyes, the diagonal lighter strokes asymmetrically match on either side of the broken bulbous nose, mounted between battered ears. The Carracci is more balanced, the wrinkles more elegant; the nod to painted saints stronger; wisdom and experience. Freud’s Deakin has not learnt much from all that action.

Carracci’s Portrait of an Old Woman links the two artists. She has some lipstick maybe but no jewellery and she is painted over existing writing, apparently a laundry list. That writing gives a sense of the layers of the past we cover as we cling to life;  another form of palimpsest. She too has redness around her eyes, pink bags beneath them matched by pink on the cheekbones and nose, strong muscles around the mouth; also someone who has lived. Her eyes are sharp, especially when compared with the glazed blankness of Lucian Freud’s painting of his mother suffering from dementia. The Italian is in the traditional three-quarter pose, she is still a painting whereas Lucian Freud’s mother is almost square on, facing you like a person (The Painter's Mother II). Her impassivity centres on her empty eyes; what it is that makes a person ‘there’?

Afterwards, go down to the National Gallery. Compare Freud’s Deakin and Carracci’s Old Woman with Rembrandt’s Self Portrait aged 63, painted in his last years. Rembrandt’s paint was worried into being with brushes, fingers, and paintbrush handles. There is a grey beneath the skin, his heavy bags under the eyes turn into folds; a weary worn old man. The skin and eyes of a painter who can create an art that embodies age solely through the manipulation of his material, Rembrandt doesn’t just represent old age, his layers of paint recreate it, almost geologically. Freud’s impasto represents accumulated experience yet each overloaded stroke shimmers with vitality, apparently he remixed every single brushstroke. Carracci presents the elegance of the painted solution to representing old age.

To confirm this observation, pop through to look at the National Gallery’s Raphael, Portrait of Julius II, an old man painted by a younger one. The face almost melting with age, some wrinkling around the right eye. Raphael doesn’t know his way around wrinkles like the older artists; possessing them brings accuracy one presumes. Julius’ eyes, though not surrounded by pink in the ways we have seen, are losing their lustre. Are we meant to see this as inward looking, the straightforward notion that in old age we look backwards? This is mostly a painting about power. Look at his hands, surprisingly grubby with broken nails, the thumbnail especially, hands that grabbed power, but to what end? Even in this small detail the application of paint still makes the viewer ask questions.

A catalogue accompanies the Freud/ Carracci exhibition with fine reproductions, and an essay pointing out the provenance of the Freuds and the Carraccis and the role of the latter paintings as ‘tryouts’ for larger religious works. But at £35.00 for a slim paperback volume, however elegantly produced, however high the quality of the images (mostly available elsewhere) it is not something that I could recommend. Unlike the show itself, which is a must.

Painting from Life: Carracci Freud, essays by Pilar Ordovas and Xavier Bray, designed by Sinead Madden, 2012. 72 pp., fully illustrated  in colour, £35.00. ISBN 978-0-9570287-3-9.