''What
do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.''
Lucian
Freud.
On a freezing Saturday 11TH
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!