A major New York exhibition of recent works by Lucian Freud, Sigmund's grandson, coincided with last Decembers meeting of The American. The exhibit, mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was the occasion for a slide-illustrated Program for Spouses, “The Art of Lucian Freud.” Chaired by Alvin Frank, the panel featured art critic Donald Kuspit, with art historian and psychologist Mary Gedo as discussant. Lucian Freud is on many authorities' short list of greatest living artists, and has been compared to Ingres, Degas, Rembrandt, and Velásquez. Yet he is not well known in the United States, and is shown and collected primarily in England, where he grew up and makes his home, and on the Continent. For Freud, although a tireless worker, is painstakingly slow, producing but a handful of oils, usually nude portraits, and still fewer drawings and etchings.
Born in Berlin in 1922, he was the second of three sons bom to Ernst Freud, Sigmund's youngest son, and his wife Lucie. By the time his family immigrated to London in 1932, Lucian was a tireless sketcher. He was also described as a mischievous, charming child, his mother's favorite. He knew his grandfather through occasional visits to Vienna, and through more regular contacts after the flight to London. His reminiscences of the elder Freud are reported as filled with affection and nostalgia, but he refers to his Aunt Anna critically and with bitterness. As a teenager already committed to an artistic career, Lucian moved through a series of progressive schools, usually ignoring scholarship for other diversions. By his twenties he was considered an artist with a future, and had established himself in the first of two London studios. He has used them over the course of five decades to create miniature worlds, the settings for most of his works. The familiar barren contours and appurtenances—the plumbing, a cot, the artist's used paint rags, spatterings of paint on the wall—are paralleled by the repetitive portraiture of the same models, most of them well known to him. They include his mother, an inner circle of titled friends and lovers, his bookmaker, eight acknowledged children, two wives (each during her tenure), and many of his other mistresses over the years. In contrast to his grandfather, who lived a life of bourgeois Viennese restraint, Lucian is described as an inveterate bettor on horse races, a carouser, a drinker, and a womanizer.
But Donald Kuspit began with a more telling comparison. He proposed that Lucian Freud's model for the “transaction”—this is the painter's word—between artist and model is not unlike that between analyst and patient. The painter struggles to overcome “the sitter's power of censorship,” which arouses “feelings” to an “unlimited degree… from both sides.” This suggests the influence, however unconscious, of his grandfather's ideas. Often the grandson poses his figures on a bed or cot, their physical nakedness emblematic of psychic nakedness. His goal is “clinical exposure.” As his many self-portraits indicate, he achieves it with a certain arrogant, lordly gaze-from-above directed downward at the sitter. This harsh, interrogative, aggressive, even hostile glance is anything but empathic. As much as it may intend to endorse the psychoanalytic approach, it in fact suggests an ambivalence toward it, and perhaps toward his grandfather, for the glance belies any therapeutic intention.
The nudes belong to the modern category of the existentially naked, emotionally “twisted” figure. Sexuality, for all the consciousness of genitals in the pictures, is a secondary issue in these works, one “fact” of the body rather than its whole truth, simply part of its vulnerability. These bodies tend to exist unstable and unsupported in space—thrown into its emptiness at a sharp angle, suggesting the precariousness of existence. They are not only naked, but at times seem more dead than alive. (Freud has in fact painted many dead creatures and plants.) Kuspit believes that Freud paints the body to “test” the subjective as well as the objective reality and vitality of the sitter's life. The vigorous, even gross painterly handling with which the sitter's flesh is made emphatic makes it also seem diseased. There are about as many sitters painted with their eyes closed, asleep and unconscious, as open. Virtually every body is posed in such a way as to suggest that it is at odds with itself—peculiarly flawed and distorted, in a way that suggests mental torture or conflict.
To Kuspit, this all suggests annihilation anxiety; the isolation of the bodies suggests separation anxiety as well. When subjects are shown together, their intimacy is at best superficial. Both anxieties are perhaps most explicit in the artist's numerous portraits of his depressed mother, including a sketch of her dead face. In another picture, executed in 1982–1984, if her eyes were closed, we might think she was dead. In the nineties, the Australian Leigh Bowery, a corpulent transvestite performance artist—his act is to pretend to be a woman and to give birth—has replaced the artist's mother as a major sitter. More than any of Freud's other models, Bowery reveals the artist's obsession with the bodily surface as the site of the ego—the psychic as well as the physical fundament of being.
Kuspit contends that Freud has restored an affective charge to painterliness, which had lost “motivation” in post-painterly abstraction, and reunited it with the figure, which had become obsolete or at least secondary in modernism. He recalled that it was Freud's drawings that first attracted notice (Herbert Read called him the
“Ingres of Existentialism”), but that in 1954, at the age of 32, he gave up drawing for seven years, suggesting both a personal and an artistic crisis. He turned instead to painting, probably under the influence of his friend Francis Bacon. Kuspit suggested that Freud might best be understood as a toned-down Bacon, more civilized, for all the calculated, confrontational vulgarity of his figures. It is in old age that he has truly come into his own.
Mary Gedo began with the observation that Freud, though widely hailed as the greatest living realistic painter, aspired to realism neither in his early pictures, with their mannered linearity, nor in his later works, with their impastoed surfaces. Rather, Freud seems to hold that the task of the artist is “to make the human being uncomfortable,” and yet, she remarked, “we are drawn to a great work by involuntary chemistry, like a hound getting a scent.” Gedo believes that Freud's oeuvre admirably produces both effects. His oils typically present his models—primarily female and viewed from a high vantage point—sprawled in uncomfortable postures that challenge the veracity of his repeated claim that he never dictates poses. At best, Gedo agreed with Kuspit, Freud's subjects seem pitiable and vulnerable: often they resemble human versions of road kill—fresh corpses whose mottled flesh seems to deteriorate before our eyes.
Gedo observed that one class of subjects forms a notable exception to Freud's characteristic representational mode: men who possess great physical or social power are accorded far more respectful treatment. A number of the recent works shown at the Metropolitan present radical reinterpretations of figures from great art of the past. His renditions of Bowery's fleshy body, for instance, seem to evoke, without replicating, the Silenus figures
depicted by various Renaissance and Baroque artists. Similarly, the naked, full-length self-image of 1993, Painter Working, Reflection, is a loose adaptation of a celebrated Greek bronze representing Poseidon or Zeus, Freud, however, seems to depict himself here as quite another Hellenic deity—Pluto, lord of the underworld.
Gedo finds the most enigmatic of Freud's transliterations in Evening in the Studio, the most recent oil shown at the Metropolitan. Here an obscenely fat, naked woman sprawls across the picture's frontal plane to recall the pose—and the bulk—of Ribera's Drunken Silenus (1626). Unlike that zesty male figure, however, Freud's female Silenus looks diseased and repulsive. In the background sits a young woman, whose fully clothed body is further concealed by a flowered throw. On the bed next to her dozes the artist's whippet, not so coincidentally named Pluto. The model's demure pose and long, loose hair recall the similar characteristics of Madonnas painted by the Master of Flémalle, although the shell-like shape of her chairback indicates that she may simultaneously symbolize the birth of Venus. Such radical transliterations of past art suggest to Gedo that the painter may be constructing a private mythology, portraying a realm over which Freud, an artist of demonic power, rules as lord of the underworld.