Lucian Freud's Reflection with Two Children (Self-Portrait), his first use of the word "reflection" in a title, is on at the National Portrait Gallery. photo: Cea.
I don’t think Lucian Freud and I would have been friends. Not that this matters, really – one can generally appreciate an artist’s work without liking the artist. And I do appreciate his work, their unflinching depiction of people and figures that borders on the grotesque. But with such a personal artist as Freud, as presented in his retrospective, posthumous exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, some degree of affinity with the painter would probably have helped.Because this stuff is depressing.
The exhibition’s curators cannot be faulted: They have, with great attention to detail and Freud’s deep catalog of work, represented each stage of his painterly life. Works are given some contextualization, but generally left to support themselves. What the curators cannot help, of course, is just how relentlessly grim his work, as a body, is.
I’m certainly not suggesting that art need to be pleasant to look at to be worthy. But though these are paintings to admire, for their ferocity of spirit and passion, they are not paintings to love. From the 1950s on, he appears to have been painting the same emotion: despair. And that uniformity of expression makes this exhibition, in some ways, disappointing.
Freud’s work was characterized by faces that seemed abused, almost as if the brush and paint were weapons with which the artist assaulted the sitter. That psychological introspection his admirers credit his portraits with is, essentially, the same kind of introspection – it’s the long night of the soul, it’s depression, hopelessness, the state of being broken. Woman smiling looks more like a grimace; the portraits of various aristocrats heave with the pressing burden of being wealthy.
Even children, babies, are marked by Freud’s obsession with physical decomposition, rendered with pallid, yellowing, red-mottled skin and flaccid, broken bodies that make them seem far older than their years: Never before have two children holding ducks seemed so down about it. And in his later years, his increasingly impastoed canvases, especially those of nude figures sprawled amongst dirty linens and paint-soaked rags, speak more of decay and neglect than of a robust building up.
There are, of course, bright spots: His portraits of frequent sitter Leigh Bowery, an Australian performance artist, reveal a man not only comfortable in his own skin, but defiantly comfortable, as well, with others’ discomfort. Animals, despite Freud’s claim that he often saw people as animals, are allowed to express emotions beyond plain exhaustion; in Guy and Speck, a painting of a clothed man and a dog, the dog’s presence has the affect of softening the subject.
And the decay that characterizes the bulk of his paintings contrasts significantly with his earlier works. These were painted sitting down and with finer brushes, he told an interviewer, effectively restraining Freud’s wilder impulses. They also possess a clarity that offers something more complex than mere despair. Girl with a kitten, Girl with a rose, and Girl with a white dog, his paintings of his first wife, Kitty Garman, and his fine paintings of his second wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood, are imbued with a complexity of emotion that feels lacking in much of his later work. His etchings, as well, perhaps because of their precision, retain some of what made his earlier paintings so compelling.
It’s impossible not to read Freud’s tempestuous, possibly depressive life and fraught relationships with people into his paintings. Sitters often complained that posing for Freud was exhausting, emotionally and physically – that may go some way in explaining that what Freud chiefly captured was a state of depletion. Taken individually, the paintings may feel shocking, the sitters more naked than nude, and seem a revelation. Taken as a whole, it’s a relentless barrage of someone very, very good, a virtuoso, making some very depressing art.
Go see the show, which will probably be the painter’s definitive exhibition, but be prepared: There’s a pub just across the street. You might need it.
Lucian Freud Portraits is on until 27 May at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and will be at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, from 1 July to 28 October.
