I have never been a fan of Lucian Freud's painting. On the contrary, I have always found something distinctly repulsive about it.
I know that this is a minority view. Since emerging on the art scene in the mid-1940s, Freud has had an enthusiastic claque. Over the last 20 years, in particular, critics have fallen over themselves to praise his work. In 1982, Lawrence Gowing wrote an admiring monograph-thus certifying Freud's reputation among the cognoscenti-and, more recently, Robert Hughes expatiated at length about Freud's "Old Master" touch. The names of Vel?zquez and Rembrandt are regularly cited as precedents. With Freud, it is said, greatness once more walks among us. The fact that this greatness comes with a decided kink only increases its market value. Not for nothing is Lucian the grandson of Sigmund.
Freud's paintings of naked people have garnered the most extravagant praise. "As the barriers are broken down," one critic wrote in 1993, "these pictures as a group acquire some legacy of punk, clubland, drugs, and the generally non-achievement-bound spending of youth, with its mixed attraction to androgyny and eruptions of supremely gendered eroticism."
"Eruptions of supremely gendered eroticism"? When critics erupt in such supremely pretentious absurdity, it is always a sign that an artist has ascended into the art world's limelight. But Freud's paintings of naked people represent the worst side of his oeuvre. (His still lifes have always had more to recommend them.) Freud paints people without their clothes not to reveal them, but to expose them. There is something aggressive and obscene about his handling of flesh. He emphasises the raw animality of his subjects, underscored by his pictures of naked people lying on a bed with a dog.
Kenneth Clark distinguished between "naked"-unclothed and thus liable to shame-and "nude"-unclothed and thus closer to the human ideal. Freud never paints nudes in Clark's sense. Quite the reverse: he champions the brutish side of humanity. That is why Freud's "supremely gendered eroticism" is decidedly unaphrodisiac. If there is something shocking about Freud's pictures of naked people, it is not their eroticism but their blank fleshiness. Sex in these pictures is urgent, ineluctable, and thoroughly unsexy. Freud once said that "a life of absolute self-indulgence" was his "discipline." His paintings of naked people are souvenirs.
In the Poetics, Aristotle speaks of "the example of good portrait painters, who reproduce the distinctive features of a man and, at the same time, without losing the likeness, make him handsomer than he is." This has not been Freud's procedure. (Nor, indeed, of much modern art.) Lucian Freud: Recent Work 1997-2000 is now showing at the Acquavella Gallery in New York, and many of the 30-odd pictures on view reveal the painter in all his accustomed nastiness.
But there is a new element in some of the pictures which marks a welcome departure for the 78-year-old artist. Armchair by the Fireplace (1997) and other still lifes possess a quiet dignity that I do not associate with Freud. Even more surprising are some portraits. A handful of depictions of a young Irishman show the kind of respect and reticence which, instead of invading a character, allows it to unfold. His Head of a Naked Girl (1999), though characteristically gritty, has a pathos that borders on a most un-Freudian sentiment: tenderness.
Tenderness is also in evidence in the most surprising pictures in the exhibition, a pair of works inspired by Jean Baptiste Sim?on Chardin, the 18th century French master of small scenes of domestic life. The subject is a mother teaching her child to read. There is an element of human solicitude here-as well as a calmer, more modulated application of paint-which shows a side of Freud that has hitherto been hidden. Perhaps it is a sign of a late flowering into maturity after a (very) protracted adolescence; or perhaps it suggests that Freud's discipline of "absolute self-indulgence" may not be absolute, after all.
Reprinted from the Washington-based The Weekly Standard
