Vermeer a Genius - Amongst Mere Painters

On the afternoon of Saturday 19^th August 2017, my sister and brother drove Carol and I into the National Gallery of Ireland to see the touring exhibition Vermeer and The Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry. When we went into the exhibition space - my heart sank - when I saw the throngs of people! In hindsight, going at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon was not a good idea! Briefly, I was delighted to see that the walls were not cluttered with text plaques. Then I realised that the names of the painters and paintings were printed up at the very top of the walls - so you had to crane your neck up to try and see them! It was all beginning to seem like an insane curatorial exercise!  Then I realised what a room full of people looking up to the ceiling to try to read the titles, listening to audio guides and reading exhibition guides - meant for someone actually trying to look at the art! Instead of looking at a painting and then graciously moving on to look at another painting - people stood in front of paintings they were only looking at as part of a historical slideshow - and only moved when their audio guide moved on to the next exhibit. It was a nightmarish revenge of the philistines! I rapidly exited from the first few rooms where there was a bottleneck of viewers and made my way further into the exhibition were there was less people. But I could feel my hackles rising as I struggled to get lost in the paintings. A few minutes later Carol came up to me - and I explained my anxiety and frustration. Carol thought I was being unreasonable and thought people had a right to listen to audio guides. But I was adamant that an art gallery was a place to look at art not read or listen to audio guides! It was as bizarre to me - as reading a book at a concert, great fight or orgy! Carol gave me a hug and soothed by her, I calmed down and simply started going back and forth in the exhibition wherever I saw an unblocked painting - especially an unblocked painting by Vermeer. Still, I have to say it was one of the most unpleasant viewings in an exhibition I had ever had - in any museum in the world. That Vermeer’s paintings amidst the throngs of people - still lingered in my mind weeks later - like the memory of the faces of long lost loves - was a tribute to the transcendent beauty of Vermeer’s art.                

The exhibition Vermeer and The Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry had ten paintings by Johannes Vermeer and a further fifty paintings by his best peers and rivals like Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, Jan Steen, Gabriel Metsu, Pieter de Hooch and Frans van Mieris. Accompanying the exhibition was an incredibly detailed historical survey of the period that was a must for Vermeer fanatics but my own interest in Vermeer was less obsessive - since I had always preferred the dashing alla-prima brushstrokes of Franz Hals’s portraits and the imaginative expressivity of Rembrandt the painter, draughtsman and printmaker.                                                                                                                                         

The whole point of Vermeer and The Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry was to wreck revenge upon Tracy Chevalier’s book Girl with a Pearl Earring and in particular the Hollywood film based on it. Since the Twentieth century there has been antagonism between the artistic establishment and the Romantic representation of artists in Hollywood movies. The depiction of an artist battling for recognition against a hidebound art world is made for film as much as the story of a boxer trying to achieve success in the ring. It allows film makers to concentrate on human drama of the most personal kind. The trouble is, the script for the average movie is eighty pages long and there is only so much you can say about an artist in a little over an hour and a half. So historians grumble about Romantic exaggeration, factual inaccuracy and lack of context. Then they produce books like Vermeer and The Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry - which is the artistic equivalent of a train-spotters guide to Dutch Genre Painting. It is laden with the most obscure and pointless facts about Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, Jan Steen, Gabriel Metsu, Pieter de Hooch and Frans van Mieris and Johanne Vermeer; where they lived, where they may have travelled to, who they many have known, how many paintings they painted, what kind of prices they achieved in their lifetimes for each painting and after their deaths, what kinds of pigments they used, how they painted fur, silk, walls, skin, and so on…  The exhibition and catalogue showed conclusively how Vermeer’s peers like Gerard ter Borch invented many of the visual tropes of Dutch Genre and how it was Frans van Mieris that was the most successful and famous of the group well into the Eighteenth century. Well, call me a boorish, but I ended up longing for the myth of Vermeer the exceptional human being and genius. And to be spared the academic forest of influences and symbols - and walls filled with paintings by minor painters - I did not give a dam about! All I longed for was to be left alone in a room with just Vermeer’s paintings! Despite all their efforts to create a liberal community of equal artists – Vermeer stood out like a sore thumb with his singular genius, evocation of soul and refusal to be deconstructed by academic hacks. So despite all this contemporary research, I concurred with John Berger’s observation from 1966 that, “... the only thing Vermeer had in common with the other Dutch interior painters was his subject matter, and this was no more than his starting point.” (John Berger, The Painter in His Studio, John Berger: Selected Essays, New York: Pantheon Books, 2001, P. 122.) Thus sometimes, ‘myths’ tell us far more than the smart arsed retrospective carping of academics devoid of connoisseurship and determined to make a point.                                                                                  

Since I had already enjoyed an extensive exhibition of Metsu over six years ago and we already had two of the finest Metsu’s in the world in the National Gallery - I was not that interested in looking at his work again. And try as I might to summon interest in the rest of Vermeer’s peers, I was left unmoved. They were all technically fine painters – but as Berger noted, Vermeer was doing something so much more than painting rich people enjoying their wealth. Yes, Vermeer used and built upon many of the tropes of genre painting at the time, for example; the depiction of women reading letters, playing musical instruments or wistfully busying themselves with domestic chores or the use of rooms seen through doorways from outside other rooms. But it was how he constructed these scenes and then painted them that made his works speak in the most sophisticated way about the philosophy of painting!                               

                                       

Apart from Vermeer, my favourite paintings were by Gabriel Metsu and Gerard ter Borch - but I was shocked by how uneven they were from painting to painting. I loathed the work of Gerrit Dou who was consistently technically smug and aesthetically awful and to a lesser extent the inexpressive Frans van Mieris. Compared with Vermeer, the work of the likes of Gerrit Dou appeared too impersonal, fantastical, extravagant and technically narcissistic, Gerard ter Borch’s work was too inconsistent, awkward, mundane and superficial, Jan Steen too slick, anecdotal and trivial, Gabriel Metsu too inconsistent, cold and tedious, Pieter de Hooch varied from imitative mastery to shocking crudeness and Frans van Mieris was too slick, trivial and soulless. 

                                                                                                                               

Most of the dramatic tableaus of Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, Jan Steen, Gabriel Metsu, Pieter de Hooch and Frans van Mieris were like amateur theatre compared with the cinema vérité of Vermeer. Vermeer’s people went beyond mere people posing - to people posing and actually exposing their souls despite themselves - because of the human insight of Vermeer and his masterful lighting, composition, and abstract painterly genius.                                                                                                                                 

Overall too many of Vermeer’s peer’s paintings were full of clunky symbolism and ham acting and most importantly their painting technique was vacuously skilful. For example, in Vermeer’s day Gerrit Dou a star pupil of Rembrandt was one of the most successful painters of the day. But looking at his syrupy detailed painting The Dropsical Woman from 1663 - I found nauseating. Despite an obviously high work ethic and technical command, Gerrit Dou’s work lacked any real humanity or aesthetic vision – instead he looked to me like someone who today would be making kitsch, fantasy illustrations - that are all style and no substance.                                                                          

                                                            

The ‘fine’ painting techniques of these painters who strove for a kind of hyperrealism - were feats of skill. But technique and skill are only part of the story of artistic greatness - without personal vision, soul, ideas and humanity they mean nothing. Most of these paintings were valuable only as historical records of the vanity of the rich at the time. So the whole world of Dutch Genre painting left me feeling unexpected Marxist disgust for such smug painterly servitude and such a decadent world of material exhibitionism – it was like being forced to watch The Kardashians for hours on end.                                    

                         

Living and working in Delft a small town ringed with canals with a population of a mere 25,000, Vermeer proved genius can emerge anywhere. Long before the Impressionists, the first bourgeois art movement occurred in Holland were artists created paintings about and for their fellow citizens. Yet coming at the tail end of the Dutch Golden Age, Vermeer had only a couple of decades to enjoy the buoyant art market in Holland before the war brought an abrupt end to the Dutch Golden Age and catastrophe for tiny Holland.                                                                                                                                         

We know virtually nothing about Vermeer the man, since he left no drawings or letters and no one recounted meeting him or seeing him paint. At the end of his life, he suffered some sort of loss of faith in his art, painted with less mastery and less often and suffered some kind of physical collapse and died the next day at the age of forty-three. We don’t even know where he was buried. Moreover, there are only thirty-five paintings attributed to him that have survived and only three were dated. Vermeer’s father had been an inn-keeper and picture dealer and many of the fine objects in Vermeer’s paintings may have come from his father’s collection. Vermeer also became a picture dealer to support himself because at a time when many of his peers were making fifty canvases a year - he struggled to finish two or three. We do not know who trained Vermeer but by the age of twenty he was already a member of the artist’s guild in Delft. Vermeer’s early paintings owed a debt to the recently deceased Carel Fabritius the painter of The Goldfinch who Vermeer may have known before his death and some have speculated was trained by him. Vermeer had one local collector who bought around two-thirds of his output. He only used the finest linen canvases and ground his own paints like all other artists of the day. He was particularly fond of lapis lazuli a pigment more valuable per ounce than gold. To put that into context, today artists, buy paint in tubes, and use the far more economical ultramarine blue which today costs around €11.25 for a 60ml tube whereas a tube of lapis lazuli from the same maker would cost €94.65 for a 60ml tube! Born a Protestant, Vermeer, married the Catholic Catharina Bolnes in April 1656 and I imagine he loved her dearly. His mature paintings combined a love of feminine charms with spiritual questioning. A mostly housebound painter, Vermeer lived for his wife, eleven children and his art. The most common female model in his paintings may have been his wife and often she may have been pregnant. Other models may have been his many daughters or maids. Though he must have spent long hours in his studio at home, he must also have travelled around Holland to familiarise himself with the art of his peers which the exhibition showed he learned greatly from.        

In Vermeer’s early canvases the attraction and titillation between the sexes was made explicit sometimes too explicit. One of his first canvases that survives, The Procuress from 1656 featured two leering men, the one on the left may have been Vermeer holding a glass of wine and laughing while looking out towards the viewer, while his friend cups his left hand around the harlot’s breast and presents her with a coin with the right hand - while in the background the sinister madam oversees the exchange. The Procuress was crude not only visually but also in terms of subject matter and character. But Vermeer was to learn from the overly dramatic failure of this work - that often it was better to leave things to the viewer’s imagination. So in Vermeer’s later paintings, things have either just happened or are about to happen and the viewer is left to wonder about the situation. In fact, Vermeer became a master of sophisticated voyeurism - where the viewer is allowed to secretly view a scene they are not supposed to. It is also notable that when men appeared in his later works they were often artists, men of science or learning – mirroring his own mature, cultured and thoughtful masculinity - rather than the rouges of his early work.                        

Everything that we now prize in Vermeer, the quiet, understated and detailed beauty of his work and its rarity - made it almost impossible for him to make a big impact with his work even in the Dutch Golden Age. Today, with the tsunami of artworks on the internet and in the countless galleries around the world - he would have found it ever more difficult. Vermeer was one of those introverted, neurotic geniuses that are not even noticed amongst the noisy empty-headed braggarts and social whores of the art world elbowing their way to money and fame. He did not paint the kind of click-bait images we are bombarded with today - that are dead as soon as you glance at them – but rather he created images that make you ceaselessly wonder. In fact, if alive today to see ignoramuses becoming famous for doodles on post-it notes and collections of junk - he may have given up art completely.                                                             

When you first start art, you think it’s all about stylish affirmations and technical tricks but by middle age you understand it is an endless series of questions. Vermeer was one of those few painters who leave you speechless and questioning. Forgotten for nearly three centuries, Vermeer was only rediscovered by the art critic Théophile Toré-Burger who brought his work to the attention of art lovers in the late nineteenth century. Since then Vermeer’s reputation has continued to grow to the point where he is now considered one of the greatest painters to have ever lived.                                                                                

Having painted all my life and in all kinds of styles, never mind, having read hundreds of books and magazines on art and visited countless museums and galleries around the world - I find that I can understand how most paintings are made - even if I could not do it myself. But there are some geniuses of painting that I not only could not copy satisfactorily – I still don’t fully understand how they did it. But at least I am honest, other more deluded painters like Dalí tried to ape Vermeer - but just look at Vermeer’s The Lace Maker and then at Dalí’s copy and laugh! Yet Dalí thanks to his own hype, was hailed by many (who should have known better) as the only painter in the Twentieth Century that had the skills of an Old Master. So maybe now, you can start to wonder - at the catastrophic fracture between the Old Masters and us!                                 

With virtually all other painters, I find that going from a distance to close to the painting to right up to its face - makes the painting completely explicable. Yet with the true geniuses of painting like; van Eyck, Rembrandt, Velazquez or Vermeer – coming up close to the painting only increases the mystery! Vermeer’s idiosyncratic and pain-staking approach to painting; his use of a camera obscura, his intricate laying in of perspective lines, his subtle and soft painting technique with few visible brush marks or impasto, his masterly blurring of forms and simultaneous lightning spots of detail and his patient painting and endless looking - made his work infinitely mysterious. Moreover, despite their immaculate, jewel like perfection and detail – Vermeer’s work looks effortless. Yet, knowing just how much craft, skill and patience even a square inch of his paintings required, I must imagine that he often teared his hair out with the mental effort!                

In 2001 in their famous book Secret Knowledge David Hockney and Charles Falco made the not very original point that many artists since van Eyck may have used a camera obscura or some form of optical device to plot their paintings. While I believe that there is merit in this claim - especially with Vermeer, because apart from the strange perspectives and collaged look of some of Vermeer’s paintings - what is also notable is the way he seems to be painting forms derived from images – resulting in forms that verge on the abstract. Yet it is not as pronounced as it might be with a lesser artist - because Vermeer had superfine, modelling skills and an intimate understanding of form. It is also notable how ethereal many of Vermeer’s figures seem in comparison to their surroundings - perhaps because while the room and settings stayed put throughout the painting process - his sitters may not have been present for long. It has been noted that after his death, when his wife had to sell most of their possessions because they were bankrupt - there was no mention of any optical devices in his possession. On the other hand, he was friends with the lens maker Antonie van Leeuwenhoek who was also his executor at his death. Leading to speculation that van Leeuwenhoek - omitted any reference to a camera obscura device. So Vermeer may well have gained many insights from looking at the world through a camera obscura - but I do not think it played as big a part in the final work as Hockney and others claim. And even if it did, it does not make Vermeer a copycat artist - it makes him an avant-garde innovator! Countless artists since the nineteenth century have used photographs of their own making or by others - but that does not make them lesser artists. Only ignorant philistines believe that today.  It is not what technology you use that matters – it is what you do with it that counts! I also think that contemporary artists like Hockney use the supposed widespread use of camera obscuras by Old Masters - as an excuse for why we draw and paint so badly today. When the truth is we simply do not have the teachers, training, discipline, work ethic or lack of media distractions needed to come close to even the minor painters of the past.    

                                                                    

As an artist, I have drawn from other artist’s paintings, my imagination, from life, from pre-drawn cartoons, traced and worked from photographs, video screen-grabs and recently from my computer screen and I have found that each method has its advantages and drawbacks. But even when I paint from mediated images – I am aware that I am looking at an image with the knowledge and skill of someone who has drawn from life in the round. On the other hand, having traced images from my TV screen, I am aware how strangely compelling a traced image can be – even though it fails most traditional measures of fidelity. One can fall in love with the abstractions of tracing - and I imagine that if Vermeer did use a camera obscura he also fell in love with the abstract lessons he learned. So I am sure Vermeer also tried different approaches to reality and it is that which makes his work so enigmatic and original. Personally, I imagine that he may have initially used a camera obscura to plot the perspective in his paintings then painted them from reality but with the knowledge of what optics had taught him. Because, even if some artists today choose to work from life all the time - they must on some subconscious level - be affected by a lifetime spent surrounded by photographs, TV, cinema and the internet.            

                                                                                

Vermeer was the most brilliant architect of forms on a domestic scale and even a square inch of one of his canvases - can delight a painter with its uncanny brilliance. I was a struck by how much of Vermeer’s paintings were in soft focus but how he made them come alive with sharp pin point highlights.  Vermeer’s paintings were predominantly made up of shades and colours that have no proper name. He was a master of muted silvery greys, creams, ochres, blues, reds, yellows and greens. Like a visual poet he knew all of the things he could leave out and exactly what had to be put in to a composition. Married to his masterful craft and technique was a personality that eschewed flashy pictorial declarations, expressive manipulations or intellectual bullying. His work had a warmth and humanity nurtured by a life protected by female love and domestic security. He may have struggled financially and died a pauper, but his life had been rich in all those aspects of family life money can never buy. Like us, Vermeer lived in a time of bloody wars, religious hatred, commercial decadence and moral decay but in his modest home - he built an enchanted realm - were masculine learning and artistry was glorified and female beauty and feminine caring was worshiped. That must be why - we need moments in front of his canvases - more than ever today.           

Only a few decades ago it was popular for many talentless abstractionists to insist that all painting was abstract. It was a canard to justify their own pictorial inadequacy. It was also, almost completely untrue for most figurative painting at least up until the Impressionists and the emergence of photography. This cult for seeing all paintings even figurative ones as abstract, I suppose really got going with Cezanne in the late nineteenth century and his supposed obsession with cylinders and cubes, as well as the emergence of photography that created a mechanical form of reality that made artists aware how impersonal reality could be. But any figurative painter taking this approach will only end up with a world that looks like Lego. What such a cult of abstraction fails to realise is that conventional drawing and painting requires an intimate understanding of form in the round - in other words to not only know what feet look like seen head on but also knowing what feet look like from all other angles – until the artist can not only see what is in front of him or her - but also what is hidden. Then they must also bring to their all-round understanding of form - the ability to impart humanity and feeling to it. If they cannot do these three things their work will be nothing more than the equivalent of an autistic person who doesn’t speak a word of English trying to recite Shakespeare.                                                                                                                                        

Yet obsessing about the abstract nature of reality - was true for an idiosyncratic genius like Vermeer who had the ability to see the world both in a conventional manner and in an avant-garde way - influenced by the use of some kind of optical device like a camera obscura – so that he could play with reality like a photographer, blurring parts of the background, highlighting the centre ground and strangely abstractly blocking in areas of the foreground so that they loom forward.                              

                              

The result was paintings that not only anticipated photograph they also supersede photography! To say that Vermeer’s paintings are photographic is an insult to Vermeer! What photograph have you ever seen with the kind of magic realism of Vermeer!                                  

                                       

Because there was something odd about Vermeer’s realism – it not only convinced completely at a distance – it also baffled and bewildered up close. Much the way reality itself does - if inspected closely! The only artist to match the fantastic realism of Vermeer was Jan van Eyck who came nearly two centuries before Vermeer and who was another artist that was suspected to have used optical devices.     

                          

How often do we look at our hands? All our life I suppose - but mostly absentmindedly. Yet whenever we really look at our hands closely we are shocked by their complexity and strangeness. A genius like Vermeer did something very similar with bourgeois domestic scenes we may have taken for granted. He showed us again and again, how strangely beautiful the world is – even our own habitual environments that we do not appreciate or only distractedly pay attention to. Vermeer a virtual studio hermit - albeit one with a large and vibrant family - spent his life looking and looking and looking into the world around him and discovered mystery and magic everywhere!                                                         

However, with all my misgivings about the curation of Vermeer and The Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry, I would barely have given this exhibition and its masturbatory-academic accompanying catalogue 4/10!                                              

The NGI Revisited and Reconsidered

I got up early on Thursday 27^th July 2017, and Carol and I spontaneously decided to go into town and see the newly refurbished National Gallery of Ireland. For months, beforehand - I had looked forward to seeing again all those paintings - I had grown up looking at. But I had also ruminated upon the meaning the National Gallery had for me as an artist. For six years the vast majority of the gallery had been shut down for renovation work that cost €25 million. More than a mere restoration, much of the gallery had been gutted and completely rebuilt to include new gallery spaces and vital heating and air conditioning units. During the many years of renovation of the National Gallery, I had felt like a part of me had been amputated. During my youth, my first ideas about artistic quality were shaped by the National Gallery. In my early teens, I shifted from a love of the Impressionists to the Dutch masters of the Golden Age - to the French Neo-Classists and Romantic painters all represented in varying quality in the National Gallery of Ireland.                                                                                                                         

Then at fifteen, I underwent a radical transformation of my idea of art through books on Expressionism and in particular the taboo Egon Schiele - who for decades I only knew through reproductions. My discovery of Schiele came at a vital moment in my life. Throughout all the traumatic and horrific events that I had experienced as a child - because my mother had paranoid-schizophrenia – I had practiced a stone faced look and refusal to talk to people. It had been the same in my art - which said nothing about me as a person. But by fifteen my stoic defence had started to crack and I had desperately looked to art history - for artists who had shared a similarly wounded experience of life. Looking at Expressionist painters like van Gogh, Munch and Schiele - I suddenly realised that the world did not look the same when you felt inner anguish and despair and to pretend that it did - was to lie not only to the public - but to yourself.             

Through Schiele, I also became shockingly aware of just how much of human existence and failing like our sexuality and insanity was edited out of Classical Art. Long before Hollywood was the “dream factory” – painting was the dream factory - where the great and good were idealised and immortalised and all their flaws as human beings edited out. So much so, that the idealistic images in paintings were taken to be the truth by philosophers -  yet it was actually the greatest lie ever told! At the age of fifteen through Egon Schiele, I became aware that the light represented in Western art represented only about 5% of the real universe of existence – 95% of which was made up by the invisible dark matter of existence - deemed too ugly, immoral or politically incorrect to record. But stuck in pre-internet Dublin, all these revelations came to me through foreign art books and magazines and certainly not through the National Gallery or in fact any other gallery in the hyper-censored, repressed and hypocritical Irish capital.                   

Thus, although throughout my life, I continued to visit the National Gallery and marvel at the technical skill of its painters - and wish I had anything like their work ethic, technical skill and refinement – I became antagonistically obsessed with their rank servitude to the rich and powerful, their humanitarian lies, their moral hypocrisy and their social conservatism.  

             

Unlike so many arrogant and self-congratulatory public figures – I regretted almost everything in my life. Chief amongst my regrets was my failure to achieve my childhood dream of artistic greatness. Many of the reasons I failed were a result of things outside my control. I could not help that I never received the kind of Classical atelier training I wanted as a child - and at an age when I would have accepted and been thankful of such training. So I had to teach myself by making every mistake in the book and trying to develop my own kind of virtuosity. Nor could I help that my childhood had been such an insane horror show that it would break me inside and permanently alienate me from others - and make them avoid and reject me. But I was responsible for what I chose to learn from a childhood of madness, neglect, abuse and loneliness. What I learned was that life was full of pain and darkness and I simply could not believe in - never mind recreate - the illusions of faith, truth and beauty of the Old Masters. But I could not help, that when I produced my painfully honest works – people would call me a talentless, insane, perverted maniac. Still, I knew I could never paint what or how others wanted me to. No matter how much reverence I had for the Old Masters – I knew my world had little in common with theirs not only existentially but also historically after; photography, cinema, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, radio, feminism, world war, popular culture, democracy, mass pornography and reality television.                                                                                                  

The Impressionists like Manet and Degas were the last great painters to learn and extend the lessons of the Louvre. The last great painter to try to marry the lessons of the Louvre and nature was Cézanne who famously declared that he wanted to remake nature after Poussin. But frankly if Poussin had been able to come back from the dead and was forced to meet Cézanne - he would have though he was a madman who had taken his name in vain! By 1909, Futurists like Marinetti were declaring that they wanted to destroy the museums and that “Admiring an old picture is about as much good as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn…” (F. T. Marinetti, Manifesto of Futurism, Le Figero, 20^th February, 1909) By the late teens of the Twentieth Century the link between contemporary art and historical western art had been completely broken and all that was left was artists like Picasso making cynical pastiches of Ingres. With the notable exceptions of painters like Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, since then virtually everything produced by artists about historical art has been just that – cynical pastiche, ironic sampling or even worse socio-political hijack.                                                                                  

Mere art aside, the most important cultural change in our lifetime - and in fact since Guttenberg’s printing press in the mid fifteenth century - has been the Pandora’s box of the internet. For millennia, kings, religious leaders and heads of state had held a stranglehold over culture and censored anything they did not approve of - or was a threat to their authority. Meanwhile they commissioned painters to glorify them in their luxurious homes, write sycophantic essays about them in the press - while simultaneously censoring, imprisoning or socially ruining anyone who critiqued their authority. The last century of culture in the West could thus be seen as a slow and painful tearing down of all the idealistic lies of the Victorians and those before them - and the fight for free speech. Yet even with all the artistic and intellectual battles for free expression – those in authority still held remarkable control over culture either through direct censorship, moral condemnation, political re-education, the control of editorial boards, the restriction of patronage or the manipulation of desire through advertising. Then almost overnight, the internet demolished all the traditional editorial boards and censorship committees - and attempts to control information and ‘protect’ the vulnerable. With the internet, everyone became their own publishers including all those undesirable people - elitist culture had so vociferously banished from their palaces of art. The internet also resulted in the de facto demolishing of the centuries old elitist copyright laws which became ransacked wholesale not only by the public but more importantly by media company’s exploiting the dissemination of content without payment. Thus YouTube and PornHub - were even more culturally radical than most of the artists, novelists and philosophers of the twentieth century combined!                                                                                                                                            

Yet how many of our freedoms on the net today will be around in even fifty years’ time is open to debate - since already countless laws are being passed by governments around the world to curb internet freedoms, we are all under mass surveillance from state agencies and commercial companies and total freedom of expression has also allowed the expression of fake news and black propaganda often by state actors. So it is only a matter of time when whole wings of prisons will be full of people who just have committed virtual crimes!                                                                                          

So all things considered, in 2017, I believed even less in the Old Masters mature and static sense of style, ideals of authority, faith, reason, morality and sexual repression than I had at fifteen. In addition, I could not see the contemporary viability of the Old Master’s labour intensive machines - because why spend a year painting a huge naturalistic, historic canvas with multiple figures - when a photograph could be taken of real people in real life and blown up as glossy wall sized print - in less than a day. Or to put it another way why paint ‘history’ when CNN showed history in the making on your 50” high-definition flat-screen. That is why, I thought that if painting had any continuing viability - it was to paint what a camera couldn’t – human emotions, the psyche of the artist or visual ideas including those critical of photography, mass media and the internet. A good example of just such a contemporary painter was the Romanian artist Adrian Ghenie whose fantastically manipulated images made one question both figuration and abstraction, photography and truth and the historical and political motives of the artist.                                                                                               

Yet, even though the National Gallery had less and less importance to my own artistic development - I would often return to appreciate what our culture had lost - in the blizzard of images and information of the internet age. What we had lost as human beings was the ability to patiently meditate on the beauty of the world and understand its deeper meanings. What we had lost as artists, was belief in art as a selfless vocation that may never achieve anything in worldly terms and a reverence for craft, the development of skills and the willingness to work like a dog for art works - than may only be appreciated by a handful of people or maybe will never be appreciated at all.

              

Returning to the National Gallery to see its newly renovated sate, I was deeply impressed by the new galleries and delighted that so many people were there enjoying it too. Sixty-five percent of the people where Irish pensioners with the remaining twenty percent young people most of them tourists. If I had been younger, single and less painfully shy and socially anxious - it would have been a great place to meet young women - most of whom seemed to be from the United Nations of hot!                                                                                                                          

Even though I had been going to the National Gallery since my childhood - even I found it confusing and hard to navigate around the new galleries - which looked so different to the ones I had known! I was stunned by the beauty of Joseph Walsh’s modern ash sculpture Magnus Modus, 2017, in the new vestibule - which from a distance looked like a weightless cream ribbon, looped in the wind - but up close, revealed itself to be the most subtly twisted, ash wood with a wonderfully evocative grain. Walsh was able to do things technically with wood that had been unimaginable in the past - yet was also a supreme craftsman - which is why he deserved his place in the National Gallery and why both Carol and I were sure of his genius.

I was impressed by the restoration of Daniel Maclise’s massive canvas the Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife which was one of the most ambitious and complex, multi-figure, history paintings by an Irish artist in the nineteenth century. The painting from 1854, commemorated the first loss of Irish freedom to the Normans in 1066 who were led by Richard de Clare known as Strongbow, but it also spoke to contemporary Irish tragedies like the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848 and the Irish Famine of 1845-50. Yet Maclise, who was one of the most successful artists of his day, also made large history paintings for the British Parliament.                                           

Personally, with the exception of the likes of Delacroix, I was temperamentally put off by most of these kinds of historical group scenes - because I personally hated crowds of people – and these academic machines too much the servants of propaganda, too impersonally grandiose and sinisterly elitist. Still, academic artists of the nineteenth century like Maclise had a dogged work ethic and technical command - beyond not only me - but virtually every other living painter in the debacle of Post-Art and social-media kitsch. Ironically the last painter who could have painted as ambitiously as Maclise was the East German painter Werner Tübke and his assistants, who had learned to travel back in time in their art - because their Communist culture prohibited - the freedom of the future of the capitalist West.                                                     

I was delighted to find that the National Gallery could now show many works that had previously been in storage or had not been up on the walls for years. I also enjoyed the new thematic hang of works - where for example portraits, nudes, still-life’s or landscapes - were presented together for instructive comparison. I was also heartened to see more female nudes on show than in previous years - when it seemed political correctness had banished many of them to the storeroom. Many of these nudes were like ancient versions of the cast of Love Island with stunningly beautiful bodies - but lacking any intellectual substance – doomed to be sneered at by the cognoscenti and dammed by no-fun feminists. But life would be almost unbearable without hotties. One nude in particular that I was delighted to see again was Matthew William Peters’ painting Sylvia a Courtesan. I had last seen it when I was about sixteen - when I was both turned on by it - and also astonished that it had been painted by a clergyman! Thanks to the new wall text beside it, I learned that the Georgian period, Belfast born painter Peters, had specialised in such ‘Fancy Pictures’ but later became an Anglican clergyman, concentrated on religious paintings and regretted his youthful saucy nudes!

              

Looking around at the 17^th century still-lives I came across Still Life with Musical Instruments by the so called “Master of Carpets” a virtually unknown Italian painter whose still-lives featured richly patterned carpets. And the carpet upon which the musical instruments were laid - was indeed fantastically detailed and tactile! Pausing for a rest, we sat on a bench beside Matthias Stom’s large canvas The Arrest of Christ from around 1641. Stom was a relatively unknown Caravaggisti and his painting was a version of a similar painting by Caravaggio’s from 40 years before. Although Stom’s work lacked the stupendous realism of Caravaggio I still found it a compelling, warm toned painting, with its character’s spot lit by lanterns and burning torches - even though he had mostly copied his style from Caravaggio - Stom still possessed more talent and skill than virtually anyone painting today. Which made me think that pastiche was mostly a term one should use for technically simplistic works from the late nineteenth century onward and not about the kind of advanced homages made by the likes of Stom.

             

Truly world class paintings are not just about feats of skill, they also embody new and profound ideas and ways of seeing the world. Yet, while the National Gallery of Ireland only had about a dozen world class paintings - it had dozens of paintings of real skill and sophistication that could instruct any student of the medium. In fact, so many of the ‘minor’ paintings in the National Gallery were technical marvels and totally beyond the skills or patience of painters today. Because I had recently spent so long on The Rank Prophet series which had demanded such exacting realist technique – I intimately knew just how much time and back-breaking work went into even a few inches of realist painting – so I was struck by how unfair it was to such painters for viewers to only spend only a few minutes looking at works that might have taken them months to create. It was like ‘listening’ to Beethoven by fast forwarding his symphonies on iTunes or casting pearls before swine.                                                                                                                                       

On the other hand, looking at the worst of the Modern European and Irish paintings in the National Gallery collection – I was struck by the cheek of such painters to present such technically simplistic works to the public – and even enduring a few seconds glimpse of their work was dispiriting. And even the best of such works simply made no sense in a museum of pre-mid-nineteenth century works. Yet again, I longed for the National Gallery to copy the Louvre and have a cut-off point in the mid nineteenth century and the have works from Impressionism onward exhibited in the Dublin City Gallery: The Hugh Lane where they would make more sense amongst its more substantial Modern holdings.

              

Still, at least European Modernists like Monet, Picasso, Gris and Soutine in the National Gallery compensated for the technical crudity of their works with the originality of their ideas and the way they changed the course of Art History. The same could not be said for the ragbag of provincial Irish mediocrities like Maine Jellett or Louis le Brocquy. The only virtue of such technically brutish Modern Irish painting, with its litany of pastiched Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Expressionism, Art Informal and Pop Art - was its supposed originality of ideas and authenticity of feeling – except their copycat ideas were stolen from abroad and their feelings were merely bad playacting. Frankly, I had more time for the backward Sean Keating’s social realism which seemed at least authentically rooted in Irish life and politics at the time. Keating may have been a conservative reactionary but the likes of Jellett and le Brocquy were frauds who had toured Europe and brought other men’s ideas back as their own.                                                                                                  

While wandering around the room of the Modern paintings, I also discovered that the National Gallery had acquired a Max Pechstein painting of fishermen from 1920. In the early years of Expressionism, Pechstein had been the most successful of the Die Brücke painters because of his slick skills but his authenticity had always been suspect and his reputation had massively declined since his heyday. The relatively late Pechstein painting in the National Gallery - was the kind of Expressionism as fashion statement - that gave Expressionism a bad name. It was worse than many paintings by the decades late to the party Irish Expressionist Michael Kane.                                                                        

              

Yet again I was incensed by the politically correct highlighting of the likes of Evie Hone whose ham-fisted, pseudo-Expressionist stain glass in the service of the Catholic Church (!) - was disgracefully placed alongside a real genius like Harry Clarke. It was just to keep feminist viragos happy - I suppose. The problem was, that by murdering for politically-correct reasons any understanding of talent, quality, originality or the Canon for the sake of identity politics and “representation”– they were not only presenting token talentless women with a prize they did not deserve. They were also decimating the credibility of the modern Canon and not just for nasty, white, male geniuses but for numerous female artists like Paula Modersohn-Becker, Alice Neel, Lee Krasner, Louise Bourgeois or Paula Rego or Tracey Emin who deserved to be thought of as great modern artists.

              

In the National Portrait Collection, I saw my first Colin Davidson painting in the flesh a portrait of the poet Michael Longley. I had watched Davidson’s career for a few years and thought he was one of the most interesting and talented painters working in Ireland. Davidson’s paintings were like Abstract-Expressionist versions of Lucian Freud - and seeing his painting in the flesh - I was even more impressed by his talent. On the other hand, I thought Davidson who seemed to produce countless portraits of the rich and famous - was in danger of becoming just another sycophantic, money-driven, Neo-Society portrait painter. I was also very impressed by Geraldine O'Neill’s large portrait of John Rocha from 2015. O'Neill’s figurative talent and skill as well as her technical command was self-evident in this portrait of the Irish designer. But I also wondered at the point of such a traditional view of the world - that did not seem to think that much had happened since the Old Masters. So all in all, I thought it a doubly smug work that represented the self-indulgence of both designer and painter. Donald Trump would have loved to be painted by Geraldine O'Neill’s! Looking again at the likes of Louis le Brocquy, Robert Ballagh and James Hanley none of who had the talent or skill of Davidson or O’Neill - I was struck not by how mediocre and conformist their work was (which it was) but how successfully they had engineered successful provincial careers for themselves, through self-censoring super-egos, hard work, relentless operating, public relations, diplomacy and a complete lack of rebellion or whiff of madness.                                                  

The art world loved to project the idea of freedom art – it lubricated their decadence. The art world loved to project the idea of artists as rebels – it made them money. But Art History teaches the exact opposite. For every Caravaggio, Goya, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Scheile, Artaud or Basquiat there were literally thousands of conformists who merely parroted the clichés of artistic fashion and politics. Even in supposedly rebellious cities like Paris, New York or London where occasionally true artistic rebels succeeded –  success at least in the short term - was usually only granted to charming and neutered mediocrities who worked their way up the greasy pole. But in the tiny Irish art world (where there was a total lack of funny money, shopaholic collectors, media sensationalists or a bohemian culture of intellectual provocateurs that could birth rebellious prodigies) there wasn’t even the odd success of a true rebel. In the incestuous Irish art world, there really was only one kind of success, and that was only granted to conformists. In Ireland, there never had been - nor maybe ever would be - a creative youth movement like Romanticism, Expressionism, Punk or the yBas. Because our creative youth were constantly forced to emigrate – leaving our culture permanently mature even geriatric - in its intellectual conformism and socially conservative stagnation. The Irish middle-classes were appalled by the insanity and decadence of people in megacities like London and New York – but it was those kinds of crazy environments that also produced ground-breaking geniuses. Our true creative rebels were buried in foreign lands or in unmarked graves outside our lunatic asylums. Still, despite the conformist dross of most Irish Modern and contemporary art a few figures stood out as at least formally exceptional like Harry Clarke, William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, Jack B. Yeats, Michael Farrell, Brian Maguire, Patrick Graham, Dorothy Cross and more recently Aideen Barry, Joseph Walsh, Colin Davidson and Geraldine O'Neill who all promised greatness - though how their work would develop was still to be seen.

              

After spending three and a half-hours looking around the National Gallery and still having not having seen everything we decided to call it day. Despite the beauty of the new National Gallery and my good mood – I could not help feeling - when looking at so many excellently painted works by the Old Masters and even minor masters - that I might as well as go home and throw my paints and brushes and most of my lifework in a skip! These Old Masters and even journeymen had a such an extraordinary work ethic, technical proficiency, intellectual gravity and frankly sanity - that put to shame not only me but most artists since Impressionism. 

Lucian Freud: Levitating Above the Waste Ground of Contemporary Art

''What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.''

Lucian Freud.

On a freezing Saturday 11^TH February, as it poured rain, my brother and sister brought us out in their car to IMMA to see the Freud Project 2016-2021, an exhibition of thirty oil paintings, nineteen etchings and one early drawing by the English master who had died in 2011. The Project had opened in October, but since I wasn’t getting up until 2pm every day, it gave me little time to go all the way over to IMMA and I felt too depressed and worn out to bother. So I was very thankful that my brother and sister had brought us over.                                             

In the mid 1950’s Freud was dubbed the “Ingres of Existentialism” by the excellent English art historian and writer Herbert Read. Later in 1993, he was hailed by the superb critic Robert Hughes as “the best realist painter alive”. Yet others who should have supported Freud (because he was trying to preserve realist painting) like Brian Sewell could only see Freud as a giant amongst the pigmies of contemporary painting and embarrassingly bad compared to the Old Masters. In 2008, Freud’s oil painting The Benefits Supervisor from 1995 of the voluptuous Sue Tilley sold for $33.6 million, the highest price for a work by a living artist at the time. Yet in the sixties and seventies he had been largely ignored by an art establishment enthralled by Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism. Having had such a long life, Freud also had a number of different stylistic periods - though each grew naturally and slowly out of the others and as his skills increased so did the ambitiousness of his paintings. With his hawkish good looks and wild sexuality, Freud was only married twice but he had around 500 other female lovers - many of them from the British upper classes. He also had over fourteen children (that we know of) with different women. He loathed the bourgeoisie (even though his own background was completely bourgeois), but mixed freely with both aristocrats, low lives and criminals. Later in life he had over three different studios and told only his models and lovers which one he was in. Few knew his phone number and the press had to try and make contact with him through his agent or solicitor. He hated filling out forms and never voted because he was so paranoid about being traceable. Yet although Freud disliked the media world, he was a skilled operator amongst rich patrons and collectors and older and conservative curators and critics. We would never have heard of him at all if he hadn’t been! He was friends with fellow painters like Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff who became known as The School of London. In the 1950’s he was a frequent visitor to Ireland and had many Irish friends and models, it is said that he liked the wildness of Dublin life.

             

Freud had been one of my heroes since the early 1990s.  Still, I had mixed feelings about the Freud Project 2016-2021 at IMMA which was being housed in a specially adapted building outside the main museum courtyard. I found it highly ironic that a painter who had been marginalised since the 1960’s by curators more interested in Pop art and Conceptualism was being used to help the flagging fortunes of IMMA whose Post-Art, progressive, pointless academic Conceptualism was not making Dublin people trek out in their masses to Kilmainham. Incredibly in 1989, Freud was shortlisted for the Turner Prize – but the prize went to the completely talentless Richard Long with his pathetic and pretentious, Neo-Stone-Age collections of sticks and stones and walking interventions in the landscape! Just another incident - to add to my endless list of how contemporary art - is a laughable and ultimately tragic joke.                                                                                            

To the kind of faddish hipsters who like to strike the pose of artist, and try to compensate for their complete lack of talent, by a liberal use of art jabberwocky and clickbait ideas – an exhibition like the Freud Project - must have been like a slap in the face of their pretentious posing. But to any student of art history over the long-term and interested in the skills and craft of painting it was a Godsend and I was delighted to see young female students drawing from the paintings and etchings. To come up with some faddish novelty - has never impressed me - even if it is the kind of thing philistines love - because it is as dumb and direct as an infomercial on TV. No, to me the greatest achievement in art, is to take what history and tradition has given you and reinventing it! That is what Freud did brilliantly with the ancient genres of the portrait, nude and nature study. For me at least, it was the most inspiring exhibition I had seen in Dublin since the last Freud exhibition in IMMA in 2007. Unlike Francis Bacon - whose art was utterly inimitable - because you ended up looking like a stupid, adolescent, student preforming an act of ventriloquism - Freud offered real inspiration one could use (in part) in your own work. It was like the way Pollock was a greater artist than de Kooning, but if you copied Pollock you only ended up looking like a fraud - whereas there were parts of de Kooning’s art you could develop with less risk of being called out on it - so de Kooning had far more acolytes.                                                                                                                                   

                

Freud’s life and work was a total rebuke to all the progressive crap foisted upon us since the 1960s. However, his work was also - a total rebuke to the swarms of professional, charmingly mediocre, figurative painters like Tai Shan Schierenberg and Jonathan Yeo - who each year created an avalanche of dumb, kitsch, slap-dash work. What all their work lacked was the years of sheer graft of Freud and his incredible integrity and intensity of vision. Intensity is something you cannot fake and only the greatest painters have it. It requires more than mere talent, personality or posturing – it requires constant hard work over decades and if you are lucky you will have a few key moments of extreme vision - brought on by events in your life or through a specially blessed creative period or obsession with a particular subject. Freud’s most intense works included some of his self-portraits, his paintings of his mother, lovers, daughters naked, some of his male and female nudes, his naked portraits of Leigh Bowery and Sue Tilley, a painting of waste ground and houses seen from his studio window and a couple of his paintings of plants and foliage. Sadly, only some of these works were included in this exhibition.  

               

One of the reason I had stopped going to exhibitions in Dublin, was I was sick to death of going to see facile, eager to please, politically-correct exhibitions (especially of artists even younger than me) in galleries and museums - that had rejected my work repeatedly with brusque distain and contempt - while they fawned over charming mediocrity. By my middle forties, it had finally dawned on me that I had been destroyed not by conservatives or religious zealots but by effete aesthetic idealists, feminist viragos and so called liberals who refused to give my art a platform or the oxygen of publicity.                                                                                                                                                              

More broadly, I had become sick to death of the art world which had turned rebellious liberalism into a new form of censorious moralism, politically-correct re-education and virtue signalling – as dogmatic as the old right-wing orthodoxy - the avant-garde had rebelled against. So since most of my heroes like Lucian Freud, were anti-heroes and even rather unpleasant people by most people’s standards, I preferred the language of failure to the assertions of positive-thinking, my work denied the possibility of changing the human condition, I saw many virtues in tradition, I was honest about my own and male desire, and refused to conform to the limited world view of people of this particular era – so I was doomed to speak a visual language no one understood - never mind liked. I also realised that success in the art world today - had nothing to do with talent, hard work, dedication, sacrifice or originality – it had to do with what would sell and what would confirm the fads, prejudices, socio-politics and morals of art world insiders. To succeed in the art world - you had to slowly work your way up the greasy pole - but they had dragged me off before I could barely begin – and now I realised I didn’t even want any part in such a phoney world. Moreover, art itself, which I had foolishly thought could embrace even the darkest aspects of human existence - and make them comprehensible and even beautiful - was mostly just escapist nonsense or obscure, progressive, academic pretension. However, I did not mind Freud, or anyone else of his quality, having a museum to himself - or blocking my path. After you Mr Freud!                                             

            

The Freud Projects version of Freud, was U rated with few of the contentious female nudes and none of the male nudes that had such an impact on me as a youth. Instead, it concentrated on his portraits, though since my interest in Freud wasn’t prurient (and found his nudes totally asexual) and I was more interested in his craft - it did not bother me. I found the Freud exhibition a curate’s egg of an exhibition, of the highest order in parts, impressive in others but dreadfully botched and overworked in others. Freud had been a constant source of inspiration to me since 1990, and he was one of the few artists I went back to time and time again. I adored Freud’s selfish devotion to his art, his refusal to bow to anyone, his solitary nature, his reclusiveness and unwillingness to participate in the modern worlds media circus - but he was also a sociable man - who simply insisted on secrecy from his friends and models.  I am sure that a regular surreptitious museum goer like Freud knew, that in the end the paintings would have to live and die by their power on the wall - rather than any theatrics on television or in newspaper gossip columns.  It was as wisdom sadly lacking in the likes of the yBa’s.                                  

              

I found it interesting the way Freud developed. He was no child prodigy but he made a virtue of his artistic naivety and forceful vision in his early paintings. As a youth, I think it was his personality and potential that impressed art world insiders - more than his actual work. Though the fact that he was a wild, attractive boy - helped amongst the gay mafia of the London art world. His early paintings were coagulated, exaggerated and caricatured paintings of people often in strange landscapes. This morphed into a more Surrealist inspired laconic style and then a more finely painted and highly finished style that owed something to both Surrealism and German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) painting - though Freud never gave German art any credit in interviews - which was not surprising given the destruction and slaughter the Germans had inflicted upon Europe and their industrial annihilation of the Jews. Speaking later of his brief surreal period, Freud declared that: “I think Lautréamont’s umbrella and sewing machine on an operating table was an unnecessarily elaborate encounter. What could be more surreal than a nose between two eyes!” After befriending Francis Bacon with whom he shared a love of Soho nightlife and gambling, Freud changed his style again, developing a broader more expressive painting and famously switching from fine sable brushes to rougher hogs hair brushes, and in 1975 took to using Cremnitz white a very heavy, lead white paint – that suited impasto and whose granular quality he thought brought flesh to life. Although his work lost the superfine detail and polish of his previous work, he still retained an acute eye for detail in his work so that almost the best thing about a painting like Two Irishmen in W11, from 1984-85, was the window in the background through which we could see an incredibly detailed - yet painterly - transcription of the street outside Freud’s studio. Bacon also influenced Freud to distort the shapes and planes of his sitters faces in new and unexpected ways which he then translated into his figures too.                    

            

For me the greatest period of Freud’s work was from the early 1960s until the late 1990s. It is in these paintings that Freud’s full arsenal of skills - which he had been developing slowly for decades - came into play in increasingly meaty works of oil paint. From the 1980s onward his work became more and more expressionist in colour and handling at least when seen close up. Freud understood what Eugène Delacroix had noted and written about in his journals many times, namely, that seen from a distance in a gallery - even the largest paintings can take on a grey appearance. Which is why painters like Tintoretto, Rubens and Delacroix had developed a more open brushwork and vivid use of colour than earlier painters - so that when seen from a distance their canvases still had impact.                                                                                      

             

From the 1990s Freud’s figure paintings became more theatrical and complex featuring multiple figures, sometimes it worked - but sadly in others it could look ludicrous. When Freud attempted to construct a narrative or use symbolism it usually looked absurd and unbelievable, perhaps the only exception being his multiple portraits of extended family in Large Interior (After Watteau) from 1981-83. By the noughties paintings of a naked pregnant Kate Moss, naked pregnant Jerry Hall and the Queen were so mediocre you could have found better paintings by a third year student in any local art college. But by now, Freud was so rich, famous and revered - that anything he painted was thought a work of genius. Sadly, most of Freud’s last work in the noughties apart from a few notable exceptions, did not end on a high like late Titian, Rembrant or Goya. Freud’s work became wonky, hesitant, fumbling and overworked - until some of the canvases looked like they had broken out in into field of coloured pimples. These late pimply paintings that unintentionally verged on the pointillist - reminded me of the painting of the beautiful Gillette that Frenhofer showed to Poussin and Porbus in Honoré de Balzac’s story Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu and which was just a mess of colours save for a foot. It was clear to me that by the end, Freud’s vision, touch, stamina and decision making was impaired.                                            

           

Throughout his career, it appeared that there was a battle of heart and soul going on within Freud’s paintings between his German background and adopted English homeland or between German proto-Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit realism and English Romanticism and Realism. Freud disliked talking about influences and those he mentioned like Hals, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Chardin, Watteau, Courbet, Constable and Degas were perhaps less important that those he did not mention like beastly Germans like Dürer. And it can be no accident that his work looks so similar to German painters that were famous when he lived in Berlin as a little boy - like Lovis Corinth and Christian Schad. As the Jesuits say, "Give me a child for his first seven years and I'll give you the man". And Freud only left Berlin at the age of eleven. Freud despised the English painter Stanley Spencer - but Spencer’s naked portrait of himself and his wife Preece in Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and His Second Wife from 1937 - foreshadowed Freud’s mature nudes.                                                  

           

When conservative critics like Andrew Graham-Dixon and Brian Sewell found fundamental faults in Freud’s drawing and painting of the figure and their surroundings and found him wanting compared with the Old Masters - I think they were being totally unfair. As a realist painter, Freud was almost totally self-taught. In fact, his early training by the likes of Cedric Morris who encouraged his students to exaggerate reality and distort features was actually counter-productive to a solid realist foundation. Lucian Freud fully illustrated - the plight of so many realist painters at the end of the twentieth century in the West - who wanted to compete with the Old Masters in figurative art - but have never had the rigorous, ten years of old academic training necessary to achieve it because such training had been dismantled by a Modernist wreaking-ball in the name of novelty, personal expression and democratic incompetence. So, self-taught as a realist painter, Freud acquired bad habits of drawing and painting - that he struggled for years to transcend - and some of them he never did.                                     

             

Besides the age of Freud, after photography, cinema, mass media, the death of God, the holocaust, Existentialism and the constant pollution of war, atrocity, crime and exhibitionistic drama that bombarded people daily through the media – had destroyed peoples ancient sense of time and purpose, idealism and faith in humanity. In his studio, Freud fought an existential battle to maintain some of the old meanings - against the circus of much of Modern art, the bankruptcy of painting, the rise of impersonal mass media and our increasingly atomised lives. Most perversely of all, for such a solitary rebel – Freud fought to maintain intimate contact with his subjects in an age when most figurative painters like Warhol, Richter or Tuymans were painting from second images of people, events and things they had never personally known or experienced. As a rebel and contrarian, Freud revelled in painting in a way that had been deemed outdated, bankrupt and reactionary by Modernism and the anti-painting school of Duchamp. Freud also clearly became addicted to the challenges of figurative painting - finding constant inspiration in a reality others could no longer see never mind understand. So dramatic was Freud’s reinvention of figurative painting - that he almost singlehandedly - made us recall the sheer magic and intoxication of painting - that tries to conjure up the world around us in coloured pigments and oil on cloth.

              

Some may have found Freud’s treatment of his sitters unflattering, embarrassing and anxiety inducing but they missed the point. To render people in some air-brushed photographic manner was pointless when the camera could do it better. Freud brought something unique to the portrait through endless attention, the accumulation of time and the intensity of his scrutiny. There were many reasons why Freud was such a dispassionate observer of the world, his poor early relationship with his domineering mother who he tried to escape, the influence of his Grandfather Sigmund which may have taught him not to reveal that much about himself - and the power of being the one asking the questions, his early childhood in a Germanic culture and the stoicism that was necessary during the horrors of the Second World War.                   

Some people seem to think it is very important who the sitters were in Freud’s paintings. I think it is almost irrelevant. So what if they were of himself, or his lovers, or they there was his daughters clothed and nude, a boxer, a doctor, an art critic, a drag performer and so on. So what if they were straight or gay, male or female. I think that was Freud’s attitude too. He was interested in painting flesh not identity. His work was a compendium of the human animal at the end of the twentieth century - no more important than his whippets that often lay near his models or his paintings of horses, bats, rats, foliage, flowers, sinks or buildings, or a rubbish tip outside his studio. Going around the exhibition looking for human interest stories is completely beyond the point and confuses art with sentimental gossip. So I completely understood Freud’s preference for titles like Head of a Man or Naked Portrait. Thus in many ways Freud’s paintings were a refutation of his grandfather who wanted his clients to unburden all the drama of their life on to him. Lucian on the other hand - seemed to believe that the face and the body told their own story in much the way physiognomists used to just before Lucian’s birth. Of course it was also a perfectly natural approach for a painter - though seemingly impossible for those who do not live through their eyes - to understand.                                                                        

I have read a lot of rubbish about Freud and listened to a lot of blather and bitching from effete, middle-class, television commentators who wouldn’t even know how to mix a skin tone on a pallet. Typically, since they know virtually nothing about art - except what they like and don’t like - they take it as their role to pontificate on character, psychology, morality and socio-politics. They should get off the bog! Socialists with their politics of envy - loathed Freud’s conservativism, his interactions with the aristocracy and his elitist talent for painting - the ultimate capitalist commodity. But just look back to history to see the miserable crap we would have to live with under socialists! Feminists like Linda Nochlin and Germaine Greer perversely took a real dislike to Freud which I have always found illuminating. Feminists from the 1970s onward had carped about the objectification of women, the unrealistic images - women had to aspire to in magazines and on television, and men’s cruel sexualisation of women. But then Freud came along and painted women like pagan idols of flesh and made even ordinary or overweight women look strangely fantastic - but not in the obvious ways of fashion photography or soft-core porn. Yet Feminists carped about Freud’s unflattering, unpleasant and meaty representations of women! Make up your fucking mind Feminists! Then perversely, years later Jenny Saville came along and female critics wet themselves praising the brilliance of Saville’s early paintings which were a weak, overblown pastiche of Freud - done with house-painters brushes – and with some feminist, fat pride, aggro thrown in! And you wonder why I am sick to death of the art world!                                                                                                                                                                            

Which reminded me of the way, I too, had been demonised by art world insiders and Feminists for producing pornographic images, yet when years later, cynical imposters like Marlena Dumas, Cecile Brown, Tracey Emin, Chantal Joffe and Rita Ackermann amongst many others produced ventriloquist porn paintings without desire (sometimes from the very images I had used years before), they were snapped up by the very galleries that had dismissed me as an insane pervert. They then, went on to exhibit in museums that had been just as contemptuous towards me. Then I had to read critics praise these female artists as so original, courageous, sexy and brilliant! True their versions of porn were pathetic, scrambled, feminised, prettified and impersonal - compared to my more anguished, honest and hardcore versions! So maybe you can understand why - I had gone way past being defiant or bitter towards the art world - to being completely revolted by it!

                                                                                      

Feminists aside, it has always struck me how perversely and contradictory people talk about the body especially when most of our bodies are so inadequate for Olympus. Women in particular seem to be the worst body fascists when it comes to looking at other women in particular - which they have a ruthless skill in denigrating - and do it so often it is hardly even noticed. Though it is a sign of the decadence of our culture that today, that there are also plenty of vain gym himbos who also judge people by their bodies and think their useless fake-tanned muscles - which they have devoted all their spare time developing, have any meaning in a war free, technological, post-modern world - yet there are plenty of reactionary bimbos who go weak at the knees for them.  

            

But in general, there really seems to be some serious body blindness and delusional thinking in even normal people - to think that they look nothing like a Freud nude male or female under electric light - but probably look more like a glamorously lit, movie star in the nip in front of a camera with a soft-focus filter! It was that kind of egotistical and fanciful thinking that Freud’s work ruthlessly exposed and which any visit to a hospital and brief look at the random, tragic bodies of the people there under strip lights confirms. Freud’s naked portraits are not only nude - but also stripped of their false social selves and left stranded in the existential no-mans-land of his studio. Freud’s nudes may not be the ultimate truth of the body in painting – since every great painter reinvents it -  but they are certainly one the most original versions of the body in art.                                                                                                                                                                                

People liked to say that Freud’s work had little emotional warmth or humanity – in other words it was not a cliché, progressive, sentimental, kitsch, or glossy idealisation of the world. Well, that is why I adored his work! Freud’s work dealt in far more complex, ambiguous and subtle emotions than mere admiration, desire, fantasy, lust, love or hate.                                                                                                                                                                    

It is true that Freud’s relationships with people could be selfish, demanding, manipulative, combative, cold and even sinister but his love of animals was serious and deeply respectful - but again not in the kind of kitsch, cute ways people love seeing in their Facebook timeline. Freud gave animals a gravity and dignity far above most of that kind of manipulative stuff.                                                                                                                                                     

What was rare in Freud’s work was bravura shorthand or flourishes with the paintbrush like virtuosos like Velázquez, Hals, Sargent or de Kooning. That kind of extrovert theatrics - did not suit his guarded and meticulous temperament. Instead, every inch of his canvases were worked and reworked until they had a titanic heft. And in Freud’s work there was none of the stupid, slavish, karaoke copying of photographs that has become such a plague in painting since the 60s. No, every inch of Freud’s paintings - no matter how realistic - always retained the weight of painting, personal touch and conviction.                              

For people who have never drawn or painted from life, the subject of the life-room is a cause for puerile comedy and smutty jokes. As both a painter of hardcore porn and painter from nude models now and then - I can attest, that I have never painted with a hard-on or rarely even aroused – there is too much work to be done and it is so difficult and all consuming. Moreover, the elation one feels when a painting is going well - is better than sex. Likewise, Freud thought you could not do two different things at the same time. For Freud, nakedness was not a subject to be ashamed of – never mind sexual - which is why neither he nor his daughters had any problem with him painting them naked.                                                              

            

For many of us, our first encounter with skin tone was through a Crayola crayon and I am still shocked that today, reputable artist quality, paint brands, produce skin tone paint! Skin tone in these various forms are just a warm peach. They are utterly ludicrous, because even if you tone them down with blue paint - you still end up with a blow-up doll of a figure. That’s fine if you are a Pop artist making an ironic comment on commercial, vacuous, fantasy culture - but laughable for a serious artist. Freud graphically showed - just how many colours one could see in flesh - if you looked hard enough! Freud’s flesh colours up-close, included muted, dirty or strident; yellows, oranges, reds, crimsons, greens, olives, purples, lilacs and blues as well as ochres, browns and greys. Freud’s paintings told the story of flesh in all its peculiarities of wrinkles, fat, bone, hairs, veins, pimples, freckles, moles, scars, stretch-marks, sunburn and dirt – but in a subtle and fantastically beautiful way - unlike a dreadfully kitsch, horror painter like Ivan Albright.   

              

To many who had never painted in their life, and knew nothing about painting, Freud’s paintings were monochromatic or just a series of ochres, greys, browns and dirty greens. They obviously had never looked closely at his work in the flesh, or just passed them in a drunk, gossipy miasma at an opening, or just couldn’t see or worse still had become so brainwashed by the kind of avant-garde colour clichés promulgated from Fauvism to Pop - that if your painting wasn’t a billboard of just two or three primary or contrasting colours - then you had no sense of colour!

             

Personally, I adored the way Freud really went for it in his paintings, putting colours you would never expect to work in the flesh tones, clothes and backgrounds. And his rendering of whites, was masterful because the painting of anything white like walls, sheets or cloth was one of the greatest tests of a painter’s ability. Freud’s whites had a kaleidoscope of very pale yellows, blues, red, greens, purples and greys inflected in them and only the highlights were pure white. There was never anything slack or lazy in Freud’s greatest canvases. Every feature, form of clothing, chair or wall had its own weight and texture. He could even make even a man’s suit - take on epic in import. Largely self-taught as a figurative painter, Freud developed his own idiosyncratic way for hatching and knitting the paint through his brushstrokes. Freud usually started his paintings by sketching in the figures in charcoal and then concentrated on the face and worked outwards - and some of his late unfinished canvases confirmed this. They also showed that in his late paintings he started off from the start - putting down unnaturalistic colours and perhaps only toned them down later.                                                                           

              

Unlike many painters today, Freud did not paint big canvases just for the sake of it and some of his best work was no bigger than an iPad or even an iPhone. There were some tiny canvases in the exhibition that were miniature masterpieces - yet still very painterly and impastoed. I had not been a fan of Freud’s etchings before but this selection of etchings completely won me over to their brilliance. Even in his etchings, Freud was obsessive and incredibly hardworking.                                         

              

After the exhibition, my brother went to bring us to dinner in The Independent Pizza Company but they were all booked up because of a GAA match in Croke Park. So eventually after trying a few other restaurants which were also fully booked up - we went to McDonalds - which I loved. Carol observed that I was always happy in McDonalds with my Big Mac meal! I may have been a snob about art but not about food!