Exhibitions
Four Paintings by Lucian Freud (Dulwich Picture Gallery, till 22 January)
Time to compare
Giles Auty
How four recent paintings by Lucian Freud came to be exhibited at Dulwich Pic- ture Gallery makes an interesting story which shows that sense and sensitivity exist somewhere still in some sections, at least, of British art. Apparently, the artist expressed disappointment that his recent works might not be seen in Britain before being consigned to a new selling agent abroad. Happily the man to whom he spoke, Neil McGregor, director of the National Gallery in London, made the imaginative suggestion that Dulwich Pic- ture Gallery might make a suitable venue for the paintings' send-off. Whether McGregor personally envisaged the final interspersing of the four works by Freud among those by artists of former times, I cannot say. Either way, it is to the credit of the director of Dulwich Picture Gallery (College Road, SE21), Giles Waterfield, that this happy event has taken place. The all-too palpable flesh of Leigh Bowery and an unknown benefit supervisor hang adja- cent now to renderings of the human body by Rubens and Sir Peter Lely. We vault effortlessly across the centuries via a simple act of juxtaposition. Who could fail to be interested in the differences of vision and technique between a 20th-century master and one or more from former times?
According to Andrew Graham-Dixon, boyish art critic for The Independent, artists of his own generation show no interest now in the historic past. Ought they to be likened, perhaps, to the youthful army offi- cer who did not know the meaning of fear — or any other word either? Ignorance and barbarity have become the watch-words of a whole new generation of artists who may count, nonetheless, on the pens of such as Sarah Kent and the pockets of such as Charles Saatchi to support them. Ms Kent's masterwork Shark Infested Waters: the Saatchi Collection of British Art in the 90s has just hit the bookshops. It may not improve with age.
So what need have we of the past? One laudable aim of education in former times was to help turn a key for the young and inexperienced which would open to them the treasure houses of literature, art and music. Without such learning processes, we stumble in the dark unable to locate our- selves or others with any accuracy. Lucian Freud is an artist for whom the past may seem hardly less real than the present. If few share his interest in painting the human figure today, why should he not converse artistically with his peers from the baroque or other periods? The language of figure painting can be timeless and univer- sal. Often it is only pandering to the whims of an age that locks an artist within his own century. Without such unnecessary com- promise he flies free.
Above Lucian Freud's ample The Bene- fit Supervisor', wherein the figure rather than the sofa appears over-stuffed, hangs Lely's too obviously beguiling 'Nymphs by a Fountain' where the roseate delights of firm flesh are temptingly laid bare — or, even more tantalisingly, almost so., To add a titillating touch of earthiness, Lely's lithe maidens have dirty feet. Unsurprisingly, Lely was a fashionable and highly success- ful painter at the rakish court of Charles II. Van Dyck provided the strongest influence on his style and Lely too became a flatter- ing portraitist.
By contrast, Freud is no flatterer. One might almost say he is the reverse. What ties him, then, to this century so unmistak- ably? Is it an existentialist emphasis, an over-insistence that we are all incipient dust? Contrast this quasi-grimness at Dul- wich with the exuberance of Rubens's `Venus, Mars and Cupid'. Such is the per- versity of our time that we despise and dis- miss optimism now as inappropriate to `our' condition. 'The Benefit Supervisor' is an examination of the grotesque. Where did the artist discover her? Not at a benefit office presumably? In a huge painting of his favourite crypto-male icon, Leigh Bow- ery, Freud indulges his passion also for grim interiors. Why is the greyish-pink of the walls so close to the hue and tone of Bowery's great bulk? Were the walls paint- ed — or dirtied — especially? Freud apparently spurns artistic artifice yet is as ready to use it as the next man. See the floor-boards in 'Nude Girl Perched on a Chair' 1991, where the diagonal angles flash past the figure like driving rain. How baroque can you get?
As Rubens and Lely set out desirable dreams of fleshly amplitude and Olympian high jinks, so Freud feeds our present, puritanical anxieties, which are a fashion- able imperative in our age. To set himself free finally of such a limiting constraint, Freud needs to cast off the expectations of all others but himself. To provide a paradigm for professional pessimists need not be such an important artist's epitaph.
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