unfinished 'Portrait of the Hound,' 2011. courtesy of Lucien Freud / National Portrait Archive.

Lucian Freud: Painting People
Yale University Press, 2012.

Lucian Freud by William Feaver
Rizzoli, 2007.

While the practice of psychoanalysis is all but embalmed and placed in its coffin, this year has been nothing if not Freudian. Lucian Freud died last July, at the age of 88, on a two-week respite from painting the unfinished Portrait of the Hound. Freud knew his body — hawk-like and sinuously muscular up until and into his crepuscular years — was falling away, beginning to look like the people he painted. He left the legs of the dog unpainted, focusing on the faces of the two creatures. He died, in that hoary old cliché, doing what he loved. He was animated and maintained, up until the end — “the work is everything.”

Robert Hughes pronounced in his 1987 catalog on Freud for the Hirshhorn Museum: “Lucian Freud has become the greatest living realist painter.” He was both technically gifted and pictorially astute, both lugubrious and unendingly prescient. A week after Freud’s death, the Metropolitan Museum of Art amended “British Painting After World War II” to the more relevant “Homage to Lucian Freud”. This past month, two blocks away, the Acquavella Galleries presented an exhibition of Lucian Freud’s drawings. There is the book recently published by the Yale University Press, which includes a foreword from Sarah Howgate, contemporary curator of the National Portrait Gallery of London, an introduction from Martin Gayford and a small tribute from David Hockney reprinted from the London Evening Standard Both Gayford and Hockney recount experiences of having the portrait painted by Freud). That is not to mention the just closed Lucian Freud: Portraits, National Portrait Gallery in London and the exhibition of his drawings at the Blain/Southern (the antecedent to the Acquavella show). There is an unsavory but persistent question that hangs around the neck of Freud’s legacy: would he have been as renowned if his grandfather had not founded modern day psychoanalysis? Questions like this are inevitable, however, they come with there own pregnant version of an uncertainty principle. One could never give a dispassionate answer. However, it would not be impertinent to suggest that between Freud fils and Freud grand-père, a plausible case could be for, if not parity, at least a recognition that more penetrating insight was not necessarily gained from the patients laying on the Viennese sofa. Sometimes, it was on the deliciously ratty maroon divan, in London, where the greatest creations of the Freudian came into fruition.

Lucian Freud was born near Berlin’s Teirgarten, on December 8, 1922, the second son of Ernst Freud (an architect in profession, an amateur painter and son of Sigmund) and Lucie Brasch. The dissociating and dislocating penumbra of National Socialism grew in step with the young Lucian. Those who called for the purity of Volk and a new 1000 year Reich were ascendant, the Jews and the educated middle classes of mitteleuropa (the Freud family claimed membership to both) looked on in horror, even the unparalleled fin de siècle wit, Karl Krauss, could only muster up the charge of stupidity against Hitler and his brown-shirts. One must try and imagine what it was like, to spend one’s formative years in a state of existential uncertainty. The condition of dread, the fear that your neighbor, not to say your neighborhood, was always on the precipice — the knowledge that the lions were waiting ravenously below, and those whom you thought to be your friends, were standing with an inflexible hand at your back, ready to stiff-arm at a moments notice. Lucian Freud’s comment “I hate being watched when at work. All the real pleasures were solitary; I can’t even read when others are about,” attests to the fact that in childhood, during his formation, he acquired certain propensities: an eye for the errant but necessary detail and a sense that solitude was not only important but an indispensable virtue for both learning and creating.

In order to flee the ever-widening conflagration, Ernst took his family to London. Lucian, by this time 11 years old, attended a series of private schools (Dartington Hall and Bryanston), where he was, with almost unnerving consistency booted to the door for improper behavior. This is made all the more spectacular by the fact that these were not, as Robert Hughes points out, not “the cloistered, philistine, flogging-and-fagging stereotype of an English boarding school,” but socially progressive institutions. During his first years in London, his work was shown in series of children’s exhibitions at the Guggenheim-Jeune Gallery and amassed an impressive corpus of drawings and sculpture, one of which — a sandstone rendering of a house, an animal in which he retained a life long affection — earned him a place in the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. His drawings from this time, many of which were shown at the Acquavella Galleries, are cartoon-like, extensively detailed and filled with death, toys, and the wonder of a world extending impossibly beyond a young child’s grasp. In his teenage years, drawing was the form where he was, both most at home, as well as most readily drawn to. Finishing his studies at the Central School, Freud moved to the quieter East Anglia School of Drawing and Painting, and came under the instruction of the autodidact painter Cedric Morris. After much encouragement from Morris, he made his leave in a fiery blaze of glory by, namely, smoking in bed and setting the school aflame.

It was in 1939, after he became a denizen of Soho, that “his life really began.” He made friends with, and very much impressed the admittedly doe-eyed Stephen Spender. This led to a long friendship and numerous connections including Cyril Connolly the editor of Horizon (who published many of his early drawings), and Sir Kenneth Clark the director of the National Gallery. It has been repeatedly pointed out that there is some similarity between Freud’s earlier painting such as Man With A Flower (Self-Portrait) (1943) with it strongly demarcated background and tight-lipped arctic expressions, and the Neue Sachlichkeit style. Although it would be untrue to say that Freud was an acolyte or even a surveyor of this movement, some of the form and style seeped, consciously or not, into his painting. His next major (and maybe the most infectious) living influence followed from a 1944 meeting with the London painter Francis Bacon. It is also in this year that he has the first of many exhibitions in the Lefevere Gallery in London. The next year, on a grant from the London Gallery, he made an aesthetic démarche to Paris, where he met Picasso and Giacometti (and was a model for the second). In 1948 he married Kitty Garmen, the daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein and his consummate model, had his first child, Annie and was hired by Slade School of Art, as a tutor.

By the late 1940s, Freud had focused his eye on Ingres, that neoclassical defender who wished for nothing more than for painting to build an integument against the insurrection of Romanticism, led by Delacroix’s Lady Liberty. In William Feaver’s Lucian Freud and Robert Hughes’ 1987 catalog, it is made clear that any affirmative association with German expressionism was stamped out by the influence of Ingres. As Hughes notes:

Ingres surfaced especially in Freud’s portraits” in one of his earliest portraits Girl with Roses (1947), painted under the spell of Ingres and the Flemish quattrocento, but to convey a sense of dislocation…the painting of a man excruciatingly conscious of style who has nevertheless learned to circumvent mannerism in the interests of feeling.

Ingres charms would remain with him, for the rest of his life: the cool and muted sense of color, the focus on the power of delineation. Ingres was not only a source of inspirations, it was a link to a tradition, as T.S. Eliot notes in Tradition and the Individual Talent: “His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead”.

Freud, set Ingres, for reasons of both contrast and emulation, in a position of great significance. An anecdote from Amaury-Duval’s, L’Atelier d’Ingres (translated by James Fenton), could be imagined mutatis mutandis between Freud and fellow painter:

One day in the studio the painter Jean-Pierre Granger complimented Ingres on his Oedipus. “I recognize the model,” Granger said.

“Ah!” said Ingres, “is that so? Is it really like him?”

“Yes, but you’ve made him far, far more beautiful.”

“What? Made him more beautiful? I’ve just copied him, copied him slavishly.”

“As you please, but he was never as beautiful as that.” This was the perfect way to exasperate Ingres, since it was tantamount to accusing him of not following his own doctrines.

“But look,” Ingres replied, “since you remember him, it must be his portrait…”

“Idealized,” said Granger.

“Indeed,” said Ingres, “well, think what you like; but my ambition is to copy my model, to be his very humble servant, and I do not idealize.”

“Idealized or not,” said Granger, “it’s very beautiful.”

It was a few years later that Freud blossomed as the living English portraitist without parallel. By 1952 he had painted Girl in Bed (1952), an exquisite work in which a girl with Scandinavian arches is lost in some day-dreamscape, vulnerable and undisturbed. The emotional rhythms carry from one woman to the next (Freud was the ne plus ultra progenitor of London; 14 children have been verified, the rumors say 40). One picture that is conspicuously missing from Painting People is the 1952 portrait of Francis Bacon painted on a copper plate. This small depiction is an almost ethereally well-structured composition, the amber glow that connected the lips, hair, and eyes, radiates around the pallor of the flatter, almost plane like surfaces of Bacon’s face. Freud imposes his vision, while Bacon pose seems unassailably natural; it is the wedding of reality and vision. It was also the year in which he painted his vatic, and no less moving Portrait of John Minton (1952). The longitude of his face seems to extend taking up most of the canvas, long enough as to be retractable. Nothing droops, not the lips, or eyes, or nose, but the is a crushing weight to the face. The wide askew eyes, the taut skin covering around high cheekbones, and the slightly mussed black hair, all grasp what no one else seemed to see, that, as Peter Campbell put it, “his downward spiral into alcoholism, and depressions which were exacerbated by unsatisfactory love affairs”, were the overtures to his own fingers clamping out the candle of his life.

Wilde’s oft quoted epigram captures some of the spirit of Freud’s quasi-expressionistic phase: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” Freud’s relationship with the mask-like nature of the face dates back to his earlier, if disavowed relationship to German expressionism. In German expressionism, the face performs as a kind of surface-layer, being equal to other pieces of the environment. Freud, as any causal viewer can tell, did not maintain this attitude for any length of time. In his later work, the face is the non-negotiable focal point. This is particularly clear in light of his triptych: Large Interior w9 (1973), The Painter’s Mother Reading (1975) and The Painter’s Mother Resting (1976). In these two, as well as The Painter’s Mother, (1982–1984) there is a sense of almost implacable devotion to the (then) recently widowed Lucie. Her expression is concentrated on some distant point, beyond the grayness of the room, the soft, simple, comfort of her clothes. Large Interior w9, the two subjects, Lucie and a naked women (Freud’s belle), are completely oblivious to each other’s existence, each intently staring at the walls that contain them, and thinking, about the man that is detaining them. Both his mother and his girlfriend meet in the farthest corner of the room, her knees, hidden under a brown blanket rise with near perfect symmetry over Lucie’s head, her hands ever so slightly clenched, the old sinuous ligaments rendered with clear definition.

There is nothing sexy in Freud’s portraits. A monitory note: lasciate ogni speranza. Gliding my eyes along the page, I am sorry to report that there will be no inflaming of the loins, and spontaneous salivation will, if fact, not occur. There are no soft translucent robes, no teasing lines between cloth and flesh. When the subjects are thin, they are something like emaciated, when the subjects are large- such as The Benefits Supervisor Resting (1994), or Leigh Bowery (Seated) (1990) — they are almost comically oversized. Leigh Bowery (an Australian performance artist) looks like nothing so much as an awkward Porphyrion. Bowery is far, far too large for the red velvet chair on which he sits. There is a certain pre-Olympian ethos to him, the grim luminosity of the flesh, the wild bewildered eyes, the incongruity of his bearing, fighting against the banality of the room. He imposes himself like Wallace Steven’s jar:

It took dominion every where. 

The jar was gray and bare.

It seems as if the later portraits were based on the men and women of the street, discovered, much in the tradition of Baudelaire’s wandering narrator’s observations in Fleurs du Mal:

Her legs were spread out like a lecherous whore

Sweating out poisonous fumes,

Who opened in slick invitational style

Her stinking and festering womb

One imagines that it may be worse to smell, rather than look at his paintings. Freud made redoubtable use of the impasto, corpulent, almost varicose painting (a style that he picked up from Bacon, the means being a switch from sable hair to hog hair brushes) was the best way to get sallow look of cooled sweat that moments before, trickled from the dells of the anemic and in the folds of the rotund. There is a disconcerting way in which Freud both catalogues the simultaneous falling and bunching of flesh as the body ages. There is a photograph of Freud painting in media res his Man With A Blue Scarf (the sitter is Martin Gayford, who penned the introduction). In the photo, Gayford looks not exactly youthful, but young for his age. In Freud’s rendering his eyes are aloof, like all of his portraits, the cheeks are creased and while the result is not exactly Wildean, there is something of Freud’s propensity to focus on what we hope others do not see when they sit across from you on the morning train.

In the introduction to this slim volume, Gayford pronounces that “Everything in his pictures is the opposite of abstract: concrete, awkward factual, nothing ever idealized or generalized”. First, this assessment is strikingly similar to Ingres’ own characterization of his work. Second, although sensu stricto, there is no abstraction to speak of, the fact of decay and immobilization (just as the beauty of Ingres’ Oedipus) cannot be accounted for without speaking to the fact that there is some form of idealization; the non-eudaemonic, the ability, to give life and dignity to the reality of life, in all of its slow and irresistible deterioration. Mark Doty recalls the image of:

Fat and shadow, oil and wax,

mobility solidified, like cooled grease in a can

Freud derived from the conflicting expressions, energies and animations of his models, and intense personal realism. This is not a vulgar, photographic realism. It is more like when Van Gogh spoke of the “reassuring, familiar look of things.” His later portraits present a world that is not based on the pretense of objectivity, however, nonetheless when we are looking at his paintings there is no doubt that what is shown has something to do with what is real.

What can we make of the face and Freud’s propensity to revise it to fit his ends? Should one, in the final account, dismiss the raw impasto, the conglomerated flesh? First, on must remember is that the face itself (the exterior structure: nose, eyes, lips, even skin) is not fixed. There is plasticity to any visage. As Freud was gazing upon his model, he seemed to assume some primordial power; his vision would be realized because, when it came down to it, his vision was real. His gaze effectively becomes the sum of all your actions, especially your misdeeds. Orwell said, by age of 40 everyone gets the face they deserve. When in Freud’s studio, everyone gets the face he observes. He gathers up all of the disparate and changing shapes dancing across the brow of the sitter, lingering on the bed; the sun on the floor and the casting of the shadow, that long indomitable shadow, across the sitters face. The point on which his entire enterprise hinges was told by Freud to Williams Feaver “I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them.”

The Freudian Eye

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