'Girl with a white dog' by Lucian Freud
There are people who cannot bring themselves to look at the paintings of Lucian Freud. His show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1993 was accompanied by warnings about explicit content at the entrance, which is extraordinary considering the standard fare of 1990s art. Possibly it was the penises on show or the sight of Freud's naked daughters so minutely scrutinised. But the discomfort is still in evidence at his new show at Tate Britain. It is perhaps best explained when he is understood not as a portrait painter-with all the speculative psychology that term implies-but as one of the greatest painters of the human body at rest. Freud's figures make themselves felt as weight, as accumulation in the paint itself. His work is so fascinating because of the ambivalent feelings it reveals about the state of doing nothing.
Freud is a connoisseur of inactivity. "My idea of leisure," he once said, "was to do with that luxurious feeling of having all the time in the world and letting it pass unused-the sensuality of indolence." His paintings are dense with the humours of lassitude. They exist in a tension between two mostly forgotten states-indolence and torpor; the luxury and agony of doing nothing.
The word indolence has its root in the Latin word indolentia meaning "freedom from pain." The OED defines it as: "The disposition to avoid trouble, toil or exertion..." The flipside of this pleasant state is represented by the Latin torpor, "numbness." Torpor is "the absence or suspension of motive, power, activity or feeling." How hard is it, Freud makes us ask, to do nothing?
Pascal was convinced that most of the world's problems start with the fact that "the condition of man is inconstancy, boredom, restiveness." Lucian Freud is more interested in the side of human nature that does as little as possible. He paints his sitters-mostly lovers, children, grandchildren or friends-over dozens of sittings, often stretching over months. "I don't delude myself," he has said, "that this is going to be what they really love doing; but on the whole they are very indulgent about spending long hours in this pursuit. This lack of pursuit." More telling than our need to do things, to project ourselves into a future, he believes, is stillness, the maintenance of presence.
But inactivity contains its own exhaustion. "Who has not experienced in moments of weakness this organic torpor more miserable than disgust?" asked the French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard. "Who has not lived through these nightmares of sluggishness and impotence, this weariness of the organs, this death that has lost even its drama?"
All drama has been drained from Freud's paintings. There is no metaphorical escape valve. The body is all there is. This is one reason people recoil; but it is also what makes Freud's imagery compelling. Its effect flips between pain and pleasure. You often sense the enviable privilege of sitting for these paintings-the abdication of responsibility. "I really liked modelling and the things that went with it: cash, prestige, friendship... and it was nice to have someone watch over me," wrote the poet Angus Cook, who modelled for Freud in the 1990s.
Freud once told me that when a model he doesn't know well takes up a position, he sometimes thinks, "Hey, that's not how you lie!" People give themselves away when they are naked and still. We will quickly know if the experience is pleasant or not. In Freud's paintings it will more likely have been both. They are a reminder of FJ Roels's dictum: "There is nothing in the understanding that was not first in the muscles." Freud's work insists that the human reality can exist only within a biological, animal reality.
For some, this is a kind of obscenity. It is undignified to see the body presented like an animal's. But Freud sees animals as fellow creatures, sharing the strange fact of carnality.
