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April 5,
2003
Flesh and Its Discontents
The Paintings
of Lucian Freud
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
There is a red chair in an indistinct room. It
stands alone. Hundreds of naked bodies have sat here or sprawled
across it. Now its arms are frayed. The upholstery is stained
black by contact with human skin. The painter is Lucian Freud.
The chair is a fixture in his Paddington studio. It reappears
over and over again in his paintings. Once the chair was a mere
prop. Now it is the subject of a portrait. A nude of sorts, stripped
of its usual human cover yet evoking the same sense of tired
isolation found in Freud's other paintings.
Lucian Freud has a thing about chairs
and couches. So did his grandfather, Sigmund Freud. Sigmund probed
the mind. Lucian is obsessed by the body. His interest in chairs
and couches and beds derives from their proximity to the flesh,
which is his unyielding concern as an artist.
And he is an artist of the first rank.
I've come to admire Freud slowly, having resisted his work for
many years. But the current retrospective of his paintings covering
more than 50 years at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary
Art settles the issue. He is our greatest living painter. Indeed,
since the deaths of Francis Bacon, Willem DeKooning and Morris
Graves there's no one who is even close.
It didn't start out that way. Freud's
early works are comparatively crude efforts, alternating between
a kind of neo-realism and a surrealist approach. But from the
beginning, he cast his die with the figurative painters and against
the mainstream of the abstractionists. It was a risky move and
perhaps he wasn't all that confident about it. Even today there
are those who call Freud hopelessly out of date. You can hear
the chiding: Too serious. Not ironic. Too much technique. And
the concession must be made. Freud is very serious; his irony
is dark and far from the flippant excretions of a Jeff Koons;
and his is a master technician, cribbing from sources as varied
as Egyptian painting and sculpture, Durer, Rembrant, Rubens,
Chardin, Velasquez, Cezanne, Courbet and Bonnard.
Freud's paintings take on an added urgency
being seen during wartime. Remember that Freud is a child of
war. He was born in Berlin in 1922. His father, Ernst, the second
son of Sigmund Freud, was an acclaimed architect and amateur
painter, who loved Hokusai, Durer and Degas. His mother, Lucie,
was a well-educated daughter of a grain merchant. Both were Jews.
Lucian Freud grew up under the tightening
grip of the Nazis. According to his mother, Freud's first word
was "alliene"-"leave me a lone." This initial
utterance would become an apt motto for much of his work.
It was a circumscribed and closely watched
childhood. There were occasional visits to Vienna to visit his
grandfather, where he played with Freud's collection of Egyptian
statues and laughed at cartoons. Freud was suffering from cancer
of the jaw and young Lucian remembers the hole in his cheek.
But by 1932, with Hitler now chancellor, the situation in Berlin
had become intolerable for Jews and Ernst Freud, with the help
of Marie Bonaparte, spirited the family away to London. Freud's
early Max Beckman-like painting, The Refugees, documents the
paranoid and furtive existence of middle-class European Jews
on the run from murderous thugs.
Sigmund Freud would hold out in Berlin
until 1938, when he finally left for Hampstead. Lucian recalls
visiting Freud in London, where they would laugh over the cartoons
of Wilhelm Busch and Punch's Fougasse. Freud also gave Lucien
a print of Bruegel's Seasons: Hunters in the Snow. But Lucian
mainly remembers his grandfather taking him to see horses and
secretly slipping him money.
Like other English school children of
the 1940s, Lucien Freud endured the Blitz and the V-1 and V-2
rocket strikes on London. Fires, bomb craters and dead bodies
were common sights in his adolescence. In the summer of 1944,
his block was hit by a V-1 rocket, shattering his window, while
one of his best early paintings, The
Painter's Room, sat unfinished on the easel. The Painter's
Room is a surrealist effort featuring a room with a couch, a
potted palm tree, and zebra with blood-red stripes sticking its
head through the window. The painting survived unscathed. But
the brush with death seems to have jolted Freud. He moved away
from stylized surrealism, owing much to the Italian Giorgio De
Chirico, toward an extraordinary series featuring Kitty Garman,
his first wife.
These paintings, which Freud says were
influenced by his study of Ingres, are drained of color, the
faces overwhelmed by large brooding eyes, the jaws clinched.
The paintings are charged with an inexplicable tension. In Girl
With a Kitten, a young woman with a baleful look grips a
kitten by the throat. There's no hint of violent intentions in
the woman's face, but the kitten seems on the verge of being
strangled.
Two years later Freud painted Girl
with Roses. The pose is nearly identical. Again Kitty Garman
is the model. The same strange look haunts her face, this time
with her lips slightly parted. Now she is tightly griping a long-stemmed
rose, spiked with thorns. Our concern has shifted from the object
being held to the woman herself.
Another painting from this period the
strangely unsettling Interior
in Paddington. A man is standing in a room, near a sickly
palm tree growing from a cracked terra cotta pot. He is wearing
a rain coat and thick glasses. His skin has a green cast to it,
as unhealthy as the tree. He holds an unlit cigarette in his
left hand, it dangles like a penis. His right hand is tightly
balled into a fist. Outside the barred window is a young boy
crouching against the wall of alley--a comicbook figure out of
Fougasse.
Taken together, these post-war portraits
present the troubled faces of the children of an empire that
has slipped away: inward-looking, unsure, anxious. As such, they
are perhaps an unsettling preview of the future faces of American
youth.
Two other works from Freud's early career
stand out. One is called Dead Heron, a painting worthy of the
great Morris Graves, who did a series of paintings of dead birds
in the 1940s and 1950s. But where Graves' birds seem like totemic
creatures, Freud's painting is an almost clinical study of the
process of death and decay at work, the structure of the awesome
bird crumpling into the canvas. But it is also a study of beauty.
The outstretched wings are given a cubist treatment that almost
puts them into motion. Call it the aesthetics of organic decay.
As if to underscore this dissonance, Freud presents the decomposing
heron upside down, as if hanging by its feet. It is a theme that
Freud will return to again and again with his human subjects.
Then there is his striking 1952 sketch
of the English painter Francis
Bacon. Using an economy of sharp lines, Freud captures Bacon's
demonic leer. He could be beckoning someone in a back alley,
his leather pants partially unzipped, his legs crossed provocatively,
his shirt held open by unseen hands. A solicitation to danger.
Freud fell under Bacon's spell. He painted
him again later in the year: a small, Vermeer-like close up of
Bacon's face, painted on a glowing surface of copper. This compact
masterpiece was stolen in 1984, when on loan from the Tate Gallery
for an exhibition in Berlin. Bacon returned the favor by painting
Freud,
dressed in suit and tie, entering a dark room. The face on
Lucian Freud's body, however, is not Freud's. It's Franz Kafka,
Freud's favorite writer.
Freud and Bacon were close friends for
more than twenty-five years. Bacon played the role of mentor.
But eventually the prodigy surpassed the master. Bacon resented
it. Bacon's grotesques are shocking, but superficial. They have
the quality of bad dreams or hallucinations. You know they'll
pass. You shiver and walk on. They don't get under the skin the
way Lucian Freud's comparatively realistic paintings do. The
more you look at Freud's post-60s work the more disturbing it
becomes.
By this time Freud had abandoned all
vestiges of the surrealism that had informed his early work.
His focus now was almost entirely on the form of living creatures,
mainly humans, but also dogs, horses, plants. Indeed, Freud often
entwines the bodies of animals with his human subjects, particularly
his whippet Pluto. This is a dog of sinuous lines: he's all legs,
tail and twisting neck.
There is also, infamously, a rat, clinched
in the hand a naked red-headed man, the thin tail of the rat
lacing over the man's thigh near his fat cock. Man
with a Rat is apparently an inside joke, apparently, aimed
at Freud's friend and sometime model, the painter Katy McEwan,
who raised Japanese lab rats. But the painting doesn't feel the
least funny. Unlike Bacon, who would have bathed the scene in
blues and blacks, Freud gives us this despairing scene in full
light, it's all russets and reds. The despair is as plain as
day.
Of course, as with his grandfather, what
you get in Lucian Freud's work are not the perversions of his
models but of his own consciousness. And the same obsession keep
asserting themselves. Freud imposes them on his subjects.
To be painted by Lucian Freud is to be
subjected to a kind of aesthetic autopsy. His portraits are as
unsparing as Goya's. But unlike Goya, who savaged the ruling
class even as he pocketed their commissions, Freud largely paints
his most intimate acquaintances: friends, family, lovers, fellow
artists, even a pregnant (and, for once, healthy looking) Kate
Moss.
But Freud is equally unforgiving of his
body. There are several self-portraits in the MOCA show. In Reflection
(Self-Portrait), Freud's grizzled face is shown in a grim and
threatening profile, suggesting Gauguin's famous devilish self-portrait.
In Painter Working from 1993, Freud depicts himself standing
nude in a dark room. It is an old man's body. He is wearing curious,
unlaced boots and nothing more. In his left hand he holds a palette.
In his right hand, a palette knife, slightly raised, as if it
were a switchblade. He looks like an
aged Perseus, emerging from the gloom, with a bodkin and Medusa's
head, warning all onlookers about the dangers that await
them.
"Painting myself is more difficult
than painting people," said Freud of this arresting self-portrait.
"The psychological element is more difficult. The first
day I reworked it, it turned out to be my father." Chew
on that, Freudians.
Lucian Freud's paintings aren't nudes.
There is nothing idealized or romanticized about their form,
putting them at striking odds with Los Angeles itself, a city
which peddles the ideal with shameless zeal. Freud paints naked
people. Nothing is hidden. Imperfections are relished, almost
fetishized. And no quarter is given by the painter.
The flesh is raw. The skin of the subjects
is achingly pale, the extremities often a scrubbed pink. The
models are English and Irish mostly. Bodies deprived of sunlight.
They look as if they were grown in these curtained rooms. In
a sense, they were. The setting for nearly all of the paintings
is his studio, as evidenced by the spatterings of paint on the
floor and wall, the repetition of the same chair and bed, the
same narrow window and its shade.
If light is the language of painting,
then skin is the text of Lucian Freud. He obsessively paints
each fold of flesh, traces each scar, zit, bluish vein, as if
these are the marks the outside world has inflicted on the body.
He also paints booze-reddened faces with an enthusiasm not seen
since Franz Hals.
Many of the figures are asleep, exposed,
vulnerable. You can't help feel that they have in some way become
Freud's victims. The painter is a voyeur and he transfers this
sensation to the viewer of the paintings. There is a slight sense
of guilt in viewing Freud's work, as if you are intruder in a
private space. In one portrait of a nude woman sleeping, there
is the shadow of a head on the floor. It is surely meant to be
Freud's. But it also becomes the viewer's.
This painting is part of a series called
Naked
Girl Asleep. Each of these paintings reimagines what is arguably
the most erotic painting in western art, Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du Monde. Courbet's
canvas shows a naked reclining woman, legs spread, vulva exposed.
The painting was eventually acquired by the neo-Freudian Jacques
Lacan, the obscure philosopher of desire, who
kept it hidden behind a wooden sliding door.
Freud's version drains away Courbet's
eroticism. The woman may be sleeping. Her eyes are closed. But
her pose seems too uncomfortable. There is the sense that she
may be dead. Dead to all the world, but Freud. Here Eros has
been supplanted by Thanatos.
There are also portraits of naked couples.
Men and women. Women and women. Men and men. They lie on beds
and couches. Across futons on the floor. Their legs and arms
slide around each other. But, with a precious few exceptions,
these are portraits of post-coital ennui, suggesting a loneliness
and alienation more pervasive than any Antonioni film.
The most acclaimed group portrait is
his 2000 painting After
Cezanne. There is a futon on the floor with a crumpled seat.
A chair is tipped on its side. The floor is stained with paint.
Against the wall is an empty bookcase. A naked woman is holding
a platter with two cups of tea. She is staring at the floor,
as she strides across the room. A naked man is laying on the
futon, his elbow propped on dirty flight of stairs. There is
a look of despondency on his face. A woman sits next to him,
her fleshy back to the viewer. She places a consoling hand on
his shoulder. The scene is at once humane and profoundly disturbing.
The same male subject appears another
large canvas by Freud called Freddy
Standing. It is night. A longhaired man is standing naked
in the corner of a yellow room. There is a window, with the shade
partially drawn. In the reflection of the glass, there is a glimpse
of Freud, brush in hand. Freddy's body is emaciated. His hands
are limp. His feet seem to almost levitate off the floor. Strangely,
his body casts a shadow on each wall, as if it were swaying.
Although there's no rope, I wipe away the impression that Freddie
wasn't so much standing as hanging.
Is Lucian Freud a Freudian? Well, his
technique is certainly anal. He compulsively wipes his brush
clean after every stroke and throws the rags on the floor of
his studio. In the late 1970s, these stained rags began regularly
showing up in his paintings. The 1992 portrait of the art critic
and photographer Bruce Bernard shows him standing alone in a
dark room, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his gray pants.
There is a stern, almost constipated look on his face. Behind
him is a pile of soiled rags.
There is another painting called Standing
by Rags featuring a naked blond woman leaning against a pile
of rags flecked with paint. But now the paint takes on the appearance
of blood. The woman's eyes are closed, her body limp. One arm
is raised unnaturally. She looks for all the world like the pose
in Annibale Carracci's Lamentation
of Christ. The rags could be her winding sheet.
Indeed, many of Freud's paintings seem
to reenact the mortification of the saints or the disposition
of Christ, recalling Correggio and Caravaggio. In Two
Men in the Studio, a pale skinned man stands on a futon,
his arms raised above his head, hands crossed. He is a dour version
of Dosso Dossi's St.
Sebastian, stripped of the arrows, the flesh wounds and the
terminal ecstasy.
Aside from these subtle echoes of other
paintings, there are no narratives to Freud's canvasses. No stories.
These are captured moments, clipped of context. "I don't
paint people the way they are, but they way they happen to be,"
says Freud.
These are bodies languishing in a kind
of isolation tank. The room is as anonymous as the one in Last
Tango in Paris (which opens with a painting by Bacon, though
Freud may have been the better choice for the mood of Bertolucci's
film.) Even when shown in groups charged with Freudian possibilities,
there's little communication between the figures. Fathers and
daughters, mothers and sons, lovers apres sex. None look at each
other. Indeed, they scarcely recognize each other's presence.
The only obvious hint of real affection is reserved for animals.
In 1970, Freud's father died. His mother
drifted into a deep, incapacitating depression. Freud and his
mother had never gotten along. He found her overbearing, excessively
maternal. She was made uncomfortable by much of his work. But
he brought her up to his studio and painted her day after day
for the next decade. "I started painting her because she
had lost interest in me," said Freud. "I couldn't have
if she'd been interested. She barely notice, but I had to overcome
avoiding her."
Lucie Freud sat for her son more for
more than 2,000 sessions, continuing until her death in 1980.
Even then, Freud couldn't stop sketching. His last
drawing of her is an eerie image of her face only moments
after her death, the skin pulled back tight, her mouth a small
black cave. Though far from sentimental, the paintings of his
again mother are the most humane works Lucian Freud has produced
to date. Eventually, she emerged from her despair and Lucian
repaired his brittle relationship with her. All in all, the sessions
themselves proved to be a more benevolent form of therapy than
Sigmund Freud ever achieved with his retinue of bourgeois patients.
In 1990, Freud stumbled across a powerful
new subject, the 300-pound performance artist Leigh Bowery. He
met Bowery in a line at a play and immediately the giant's immense
legs and feet, which were shoved into a pair of clogs. "His
calves went down to his feet, almost avoiding the issue of ankles
altogether," Freud said.
Bowery is a corpulent colossus with a
prodigious penis, which Lucian Freud reproduces in extravagant
detail, each vein rendered like a mighty river. Bowery
Seated is one of Freud's most audacious masterpieces. Here
is the red chair again, barely visible beneath Bowery's bulk.
He is a bald mountain of flesh, as imposing as that first shocking
glimpse of Brando in Apocalypse Now. There's something vaguely
Egyptian about the work, as if he were modeled on one of the
hulking scribes from the court of Ahmen-hotep.
The large canvas barely seems able to
contain him. And for the first time, Freud paints a figure who
looks the painter directly in the eye, challenging him. Unlike
the somatic figures in most of Freud's work, the portrait of
Bowery presents a self-assured and slightly menacing presence.
He is the first of Freud's nudes to convey the sense that he
knows how much his portrait may unnerve many viewers.
Yet, even Bowery seems vulnerable, rendered
down to a fragile casing of flesh. As I stared up at this huge
human mound I couldn't help thinking what a mess a Daisy Cutter
would make of this even this monumental body. Surely this is
a subtle theme of his work. You search Freud's painting in vain
for technological artifacts: there are no telephones, TVs, computers,
electrical cords, cars, or lamps. There is just bodies, a chair,
a bed, a couch. Like an elided note in a Miles Davis solo, the
missing machines assume an added menace in Freud's work. The
room serves as a sanctuary, a momentary refuge from the truly
obscene horrors that swirl outside. This then is Freud's existentialist
Eden: a dingy garret in Paddington with a small dog, naked friends
and potted plants for company.
Like his grandfather, Lucian Freud argues
that biology is destiny. But Lucian goes further than the old
man. Biology isn't just destiny. It's apparently all there is
left to cling to in an age of fleshless bureaucracies and killer
machines.
Today's
Features
Uri
Avnery
A Crooked Mirror: Presstitution and
the Theater of Operations
David
Vest
Can You Hear the Silence?
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell Telemarketer
David
Lindorff
Takoma: the Dolphin Who Refused
to Fight
Michael
Roberts
War, Debts and Deficits
Ramzy
Baroud
Now That Iraqis Are Being Killed Is Israel Any More Secure?
Jo Wilding
From Baghdad with Tears
Anton
Antonowicz
Cluster Bombs on Babylon
Alison
Weir
Israel, We Won't Forget Rachel Corrie
Bruce
Jackson
Hating Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Eliot Katz
War's First Week
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/03
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