On painting and being painted
Francis Wyndham
LUCIAN FREUD edited by Bruce Bernard and Derek Birdsall Cape, £75, pp. 360 The work of Lucian Freud, unlike Francis Bacon's, does not automatically lead commentators to vague invocation of `universality' and 'the human condition'. Deploring this, the critic David Sylvester has complained that Freud seems to see the world at close range through his eyes only, choosing attractive or repulsive sights on a personal whim, while Gilbert and George (in their 'Naked Shit Pictures', for example)
look at humanity at large with an instinct for the typical and a mature compassion.
It seems to me that if Freud looked at the world through eyes other than his own his art would be derivative instead of (as it almost always is) immaculately original; that 'an instinct for the typical' more often than not takes the form of platitude; that universal humanity may be interpreted as authentically through the unique particular as through obvious generalities; and that Freud's classic concentration on reaching the essence of some specific visual truth can achieve a result of such power that the terms 'compassion' and 'cruelty', 'attrac- tion' and 'repulsion', become beside the point.
Again and again, that power is communi- cated through the pages of this sumptuous publication. It consists of 290 plates, from a crayon drawing done in 1928 when the artist was five to an oil painting of his daughter Bella finished this year. The stan- dard of colour reproduction is of the high- est, as is that of Derek Birdsall's design. The introductory essay by Bruce Bernard, both scrupulous and fervent, abounds in enlightening perceptions and is refreshingly free from art-historian-babble. Perhaps I should admit that as a friend of both Lucian Freud and Bruce Bernard I cannot pretend to be totally impartial. My own portrait is included in the book, and the nine months it took to complete gave me a fascinating opportunity to reflect on Freud as an artist and on portraiture in general.
Being painted can strike one as vicari- ously creative or subtly transgressive; it can hardly ever seem quite natural. The actual circumstances of the procedure inevitably impose an artificial passivity on the subject, who is rendered excitedly complicit with, while sulkily challenging, the artist's hubris- tic endeavour. To 'sit' is to submit: all the available energy in the confrontation has been commandeered by the possessed fig- Francis Wyndham, 1993 ure at the easel. This hidden drama, no doubt endemic to the activity, can with Freud become almost palpable on the fin- ished canvas.
Some of the early portraits appear slight- ly distorted, as in naif or primitive art, but here suggesting a gaze on the part of the painter so unblinkingly intense that his vision — and therefore its objects — have shifted out of focus. Several of these sitters (including his two wives) have enormous eyes which he enlarges still further so that they too seem to be staring — but away from him, into space, in blank denial of his inquisitive inspection. In his later work the distortion vanishes and his gaze may almost be returned, or at least acknowledged, but an atmosphere of suspense remains: how will this person deal with the experience of being so closely watched? People of course know they are being looked at, but animals probably don't; when he pairs a human with a dog (Pluto or Speck) the extraordi- nary sense of physical mystery deepens. It reaches its zenith in one of his greatest paintings, the naked self-portrait entitled `Painter Working, Reflection 1993'. Nobody is watching him (although we are doing so now) as he watches himself creat- ing his own image — a 'poor, bare, forked animal' behaving like a god.
Bernard rightly states that 'there is no more relentlessly accurate painter than Freud of ordinary 20th-century clothing'. Details of texture, pattern, shape in the garments worn by his sitters are examined with the same dispassionate obsession that he brings to bear on his nudes, so that their presence can seem as poignantly revealing of the bodies beneath as would their absence. And if his clothed portraits dis- turbingly suggest nakedness rather than concealing it, the reverse is also true: in his paintings of the nude, the flesh is rendered in so truthful and unconventional a way that it approximates to a kind of covering material, hinting at the secrets (blood-filled veins and adipose tissue) under the skin.
The images in this book evoke Freud's own milieu: portraits of his mother (several of which are indisputable masterpieces), his daughters, his lovers, his friends, himself, while the settings are austerely limited to his two studio interiors, in Paddington and Holland Park. It amounts to a visual auto- biography — an intimate record of his inner life, which in his case is his work. To protect this work, to allow it to speak for itself — and also to protect himself from any encroachment on the time he devotes to it — he has made rather a cult of priva- cy, rarely giving interviews (when he does, they are as pared to the essence as a page of Wittgenstein) and never making official public appearances. We should not resent his reserve: instead of baring his soul, he opens our eyes.
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