Royal Academy of Arts vs National Portrait Gallery, that's where the fights are in each case.
Hockney vs Freud, that's the combatants.
FREUD
We'll deal first with the mutton-brawler Lucian Freud (1922 - 2011) at the National Portrait Gallery in London. 130 works spread across several large rooms and corridors. I've always been a fan of Freud's anatomical contortions, his gravid volumes, and was very excited to see the actual paintings in a gallery setting. Freud's work is a real revelation up close, and I don't know what I was expecting. His technique and his palette are just 'of the sewer'. His brush strokes are like visceral fistfuls of grimy offal. I've no idea how he does it, but he makes it look like he's painted with human excrement using a wire brush. They're proper awful up close; desperate, chilling. Their painted surfaces are so ugly, you just wouldn't want them in your home.
No excuses, the surfaces of these paintings was the most revolting revelation of what is a phenomenol attempt to catalog the human animal. These images are reminiscent of 'trophy kills' of some exotic beast. The way they're laid out. It's just meat, pelt. And I've always liked that raw honesty, that unblinking, unflinching, analytical eye of Freud's. He's really trying to convey the mass, the weight, even the psychological gravity of his subjects. He succeeds in his way, but it's not pretty to watch - it's like some determined near-crippled pensioner intent on seeing the top of some church tower, huffing and puffing and wheezing and complaining on his ascent and you're not sure if he'll remain alive to make it to the top.
HOCKNEY
I've never been a real fan of Hockney. He's always had the Freud-amatuer club-foot of an artistic sportsman. He's a charmer, sure, but is he a real artist? Hockney's latest series of paintings occupies the whole of the Royal Academy and takes Yorkshire landscape as its day-glo theme. Hockney's like a kid that's found some crayons, a kid that's found some video cameras, a kid that's found an ipad paint programme. He has all of Yorkshire to present and he opts for some dreary lane. I'm being harsh because he's an inspirationalist, he's a set designer, an ideasman or 'borrower', he's NOT an artist. He can't paint for toffee. His artistic technique is seriously lacking, there's no elegance in the strokes and there's a crass naivete that we're being asked to accept as an excuse for this lack of artistic workmanship.
So, Monet and Whistler painted the same subject (pond and Thames respectively) over and over again doesn't mean YOU have to. And that's the feeling I got with this exhibition, "I've got my random drab bit of Yorkshire lane and you're going to enjoy it." And there are other obvious 'easy lifts' from a historical back catalog including pointilism and VanGogh. I 'really didn't get' the religious content, it just didn't fit. And that videoroom? Who in their right mind would sit there watching a sorrily old Wayne Sleep tart about in a dayglo room, if it weren't for the fact that the inage was split into nine? Nobody. And the nine-cameras ideas was just that, a gimmick, a party trick of a clever old dog. Biscuit. Chocolate. Tail wag.
FAVOURITE FREUD @ NATIONAL PORTRAIT
the pose, the lighting, the partnership
FAVOURITE HOCKNEY @ ROYAL ACADEMY
the horizon, the color space, the flow of the journey
THE WINNER
Both of these old battling war animals have given their heart and soul to the fight and (my petty critical concerns aside) neither really deserves to lose. The world has just lost its Freud and will soon lose its Hockney. And the passing of 'ideasmen' is always a sad moment. This pair may have stlistic shortcomings but their fighting spirit and their 'soul in the ring' of artistic monumentalism has been a worthy inclusion to the pantheon of Creativity, Passion and Kinship any Free Planet would be happy to occupy its people's imaginations. A visual legacy worth sharing with the world, not keeping in sealed vaults in private hands.
