On Tuesday 5th June 2007, I went with Carol to see the Lucian Freud
exhibition in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. IMMA was housing 50 of
his paintings and twenty of his etchings and drawings through the summer. It
was a beautiful sunny day – though Carol (who hated the sun) thought it too
hot. To say that I was hyperactive with excitement before hand is an
understatement. Although I had seen isolated paintings by Freud in group shows
- I had never seen any in quantity. Of the many artists who have influenced my
own art (Picasso, Basquait, van Gogh, Schiele, Gerstl, Schnabel, de Kooning,
Rembrandt, Goya, Baselitz, Bacon and Salle) Freud was the last painter I had
yet to see in a major retrospective. To say that my expectations were met is to
put it mildly. It was the greatest exhibition I had ever seen in Ireland – with
the Francis Bacon show in 2000 a close second.
As you know, my
infatuation with Freud began in early 1992 - at a time when I was executing a
couple of life paintings in NCAD during the Easter and summer holidays. As a
clumsy student - struggling to deal with the difficulties of life drawing and
painting - I looked in awe at Freud's work - which because of their strange
realist modernity effected me so much more deeply than any other painter of the
figure. I also identified with Freud's somewhat naïve and self-taught approach
to life-painting.
Although there
was no doubt that Freud's work was riddled with the mannerism and naïve
mistakes of the largely self-taught (he had some art training in his teens but
nothing like the systematic drilling the old masters had to endure in order to
achieve mastery) - his work had genuine integrity - something distinctly
lacking in the modern art world of my day. He was also one of those rare
artists like Courbet, Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso and de Kooning whose
awkwardness was compelling, heart-rending and honest.
Artists in the
West since Raphael in the 1500s until Courbet in the late nineteenth century
painted not only an idealized version of the nude - they typically painted the
figure only as a prop in a larger visual story. Although western art had had
its fair share of sexy nudes - typically, the figure was not painted nude in
order to arouse sexual desire or even to analyze character - instead the nude
was used as an expressive character in a visual play.
The
breaking point in this tradition I would date to Gustave Courbet's The Origin of The World (1866) - an
immaculately painted oil of a woman's lower torso - the bushy vagina at its
centre. However, it was not until the turn of the twentieth century that
artists like Lovis Corinth, Richard Gerstl, Egon Schiele, Max Beckman and Otto
Dix turned the body into a psychological and psychosexual revealer of
subjective truth - and it is by these artists that Freud had to be judged - he
was part of their unofficial Expressionist/Realist school. This should have
come as no surprise - he was born and lived in Berlin until the age of eleven -
this was his cultural heritage. However, what England gave him was a sense of restraint
and Conservative order.
I observed
that in a world of noisy attention seeking loudmouths - Freud's reclusive
silence spoke volumes. It was telling that in a world were simpletons wanted to
tell you everything about themselves - none of which mattered a dam - a man
like Freud kept his council (some of my readers might wish I had done the same.)
This was part of his aristocratic baring (many of his closest friends were from
the English Gentry.) Nagging Feminist's like Linda Nochlin who sought to attack
him as a misogynist took great pains to tell of his philandering, his suspected
40 illegitimate children and his cruel abandonment of ex-lovers. I would simply
have asked these women this: Do you really think I or any other male painter
admired Freud because of his personal life? I can answer absolutely not! I
admired Freud for one reason and one bloody simple reason only - his paintings!
Personally, I found sniping attacks on Freud's supposed misogyny and
misanthropy childish, simplistic and ignorant. So what if he was? He spoke his
version of truth and that should have been good enough. From what I could see -
he was as unflattering to men as he was to women. In a world of airbrushed
photographs of super models - Freud's paintings were like a kick in the face to
a culture of lies about the body and humanity.
In 2007, pornography in the tradition of Raphael lived on
in the high budget, slick, and never anything but beautiful porn of L.A.
However, one only had to look at the home videos of amateur porn stars to see
both the real world and the world of Freud - deathly pale or sunburned, stick
thin or obsess and ugly bodies of both great humanity and repulsive
imperfection. It was Freud's grandfather Sigmund Freud who changed our
conception of self-hood more than any other thinker in western history - so it
should have come as no surprise that Lucian Freud should have gone on to paint
the human face and figure in a way almost unseen in art before.
Most of Freud's
large paintings took up to a year to paint and he worked on a number of
canvases at a time. He painted almost exclusively from life. Posing for him was
a long and sometimes arduous experience. The vast majority of his models were
friends, lovers or family. He had painted at least three of his daughters naked
- but I will leave it to others to discern the ‘Electra Complex' implications of that! During breaks, he treated his sitters to
champagne and pheasant and his was known as a great conversationalist. Like his
great friend Francis Bacon, he loved to gamble. Those who knew him spoke of his
charisma, intelligence and energy.
Critics like
Andrew-Graham Dixon and Brian Sewell had stated that Freud - although a great
realist painter - was not up to the standards of old masters like Velázquez,
Ruben's and Rembrandt - I disagreed. I thought that at their best - Freud's
canvases were as good as anything ever painted. Technically, he might have been
clumsy and wilful in a way those old masters seldom were - but in my era, he
was unique. While it was true to say that his working methods and ethos was
very different from the methods of the old masters - that did not mean that his
work was any less compelling.
In my lifetime,
Freud had become the standard-bearer of the realist tradition. This was in part
to due to his genius and in part because the tradition was so utterly bankrupt.
The trouble with 95% of the realist art produced world wide - was its
triviality, crassness and historical nostalgia. I seriously thought that most
of these 'traditional' painters were stunned personalities who liked to retreat
into some kind of fantasy they had about a Utopian age of representational art.
They were the same kind of people who built model railways and embroidered
quilts - insular, timid and deluded. Freud on the other hand had no such
delusions. He was a fully formed personality, intellect and practitioner. Most
of these pseudo-old-masters - were terrified of the ugly, strident, or
obsessive. Therefore, their work was fit for nothing but the top of a biscuit
tin. Freud on the other hand embraced the ugly - and made it look beautiful -
the sign of a truly great artist in my opinion.
I was less
interested in Freud's early paintings from the 1940s to the 1960s, and I
considered the high point of his art to be from the late 1970s to the turning
of the millennium - as his brushes got broader and his paint thicker. However
these early painting explained his late masterpieces. From the outset, he was
obsessed with the eyes of his sitters – indeed had anyone ever made eyes look
so hypnotic? From the outset, he was fond of using a stippling of lines to
define the form. From the beginning he worked on a white canvas - allowing it
to gleam through the thinly spread paint. From the outset, he had a knowing
ability to give hyperactive details to certain parts of the subject - while
treating other parts in a more general way. However, he always knew how to
marry the parts to the whole - in a way that had always escaped me in my own
work. He was a master of detail - yet never in the annoying crotchety way that
other realists were. His detail was never anything less than visceral and
exciting. I was less fond of Freud's drawings and etchings. However, they did
give some important clues to his art. In their way, his drawings had echoes of Dürer's
woodcuts. Like Dürer - Freud used very dark and strong lines to shape the
volumes of flesh.
Freud's technique in his late work
was nothing short of magnificent. This was real painting! I was amazed by how
bold and confident his brushwork was! I was thrilled by the way he went for it
with every brushstroke! There was no mistaking that a man painted these
paintings. They had a fierce muscularity and vigour utterly lacking in the
flabby and academic work of imitators like Jenny Saville, Celia Paul (an
ex-lover of Freud's), Tai-Shan and an army of art student plagiarizers.
The
masterpiece of the exhibition for me was his large canvas Two Plants 1977-80 - it was quite simply unbelievable! From a
distance, it looked like a photograph - but up close, it was a thickly painted
nest of paint. Each single leaf in this tangle of plants was recorded in all
its individuality - he did not use any formula. This painting and others he had
made of foliage recalled Dürer's famous watercolour of a great piece of turf.
Critics had
carped that Freud's paintings were all browns and greys! Were these people
blind? Yes from a distance they could look brown and gray - but get up close -
it was a fireworks display of pinks, blues, mauve's, purples, olives, tan,
cream, white, apple green, peach, plum and so on. It was a mark of his genius
for colour that he could embed in his flesh tones such bright colours and yet
fit them all in to a realistic whole. Another remarkable quality of his late
paintings was his use of thick impasto. One of the problems of using thick
paint (as I knew) was that it reduced the artist’s ability to produce subtle
effects of line and texture - but Freud managed it. His impasto was precise,
firm and solid. He not only painted his figures - he sculpted them out of
paint! I had never seen paint dry-brushed on with the loaded brush with such
finesse and accuracy.
In my view,
Freud's art was a total rebuke to the corrupted nature of the contemporary art
world. Could anyone honestly tell me that there was more depth and power in;
Barnett Newman's zips, Frank Stella's stripes, Andy Warhol's candy coloured
silkscreen portraits, Robert Ryman's all white canvases, Joseph Beuys' felt and
fat, Donald Judd's steel boxes, Joseph Kosuth's definitions of words, Cindy
Sherman's photos, Jeff's Koons' kitsch porcelains, Damien Hirst's spot
paintings, or Tracey Emin's unmade bed! Frankly to my mind all that rubbish and
so much more like it was exposed in an exhibition like this to be an utter
fraud perpetrated by self-deluded morons with more salesmanship and skill in
'art-bollocks' than any actual creative vision, craft, skill, discipline or
intelligence.