Lucian Freud: Psychoanalysis in Paint?

The Centre Pompidou in Paris has often compelled me to alter previously held artistic judgments. That fantastical mock-industrial postmodernist adventure of 1977, designed by architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, has upended my takes on such artists as Andy Warhol (retrospective, ), , and now . Perhaps there is something irresistibly transformative about exposure to so much of one artist's work in a vast enclosure of space, which both aggrandizes the art yet forces you to face it dead on. Once you are inside, nothing competes. You are perceptually whacked, emotionally battered, but also given plenty of psychic space. As a writer on art and psychoanalysis, I was drawn skeptically to the Lucian Freud show in Paris last summer partly in its valence as the work of Sigmund Freud's grandson.1 Informed moreover that Lucian Freud's canvases command some of the highest prices on the international art market today while his grandfather's star seems to be flickering, I wondered slyly whether the referent might have to change when people refer casually to Freud. Now I have both less and more doubt. The show could well be called “Psychoanalysis in Paint?” and read as a sustained nonverbal probe of the unconscious.

Concurrent with the exhibition at the Pompidou, another dazzling show was also in Paris: forty years of work in the career of Yves Saint Laurent. The crowds queuing up for these two major exhibits were indistinguishable in density and ardor. Thus, two emperors paraded before the Parisian public—one about,