Shocking painter
Different strokes
Known for his stunning portraits and nude studies, Lucian Freud believed that a painting had to astonish, disturb, seduce and convince, writes Giridhar Khasnis
“I paint what I see, not what you want me to see.” — Lucian Freud. The news about Lucian Freud’s death at his home in London last month was expectedly met with great shock and sorrow by the art world.
The 88-year-old British painter was considered to be one of the most influential artists of his time. And arguably the greatest and most celebrated figurative painter of the 20th century.
When his painting, ‘Benefits Supervisor Sleeping’, sold at Christie’s in New York in May 2008 for $33.6 million (£17.2 million), it set a record for the most expensive work by a living artist.
Freud was known for his stunning, super-realistic portraits of living people; they included nude studies of his family members, friends, lovers, fellow painters, celebrities, children and himself. In his work, he seemed obsessed with painting human flesh as never before, and in his own way, celebrate raw nakedness of the human figure.
Art critic, curator and long-term friend William Feaver observed that Freud’s paintings often appeared designed to shock. “All Freud’s portraits have a precarious air,” wrote Feaver. “He brings out the vulnerability, scanning a head minutely, numbering freckles and eyelashes. Broadening his touch (from the mid-1950s onwards) he records ageing and decay… Death haunts all portraits. Portraiture turns the living into dated beings, icons or ancestors... The painter is like death itself, the constant presence in the room.”
Another critic Adrian Searle, writing for The Guardian (July 22, 2011), felt that the paint Freud used was ‘a magnificent muck’ — with which he rendered ageing flesh, an Irishman’s neck, a dog’s fur, and a baby’s puddingy stare.
John Updike wrote a poem on Lucian Freud, which began thus: Yes, the body is a hideous thing, / the feet and genitals especially, / the human face not far behind. Blue veins / make snakes on the backs of hands, and mar / the marbled glassy massiveness of thighs…
On his part, Freud explained: “'What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.”'
He always affirmed his belief in people. “Living people interest me far more than anything else.” For him, art was essentially about himself and his surroundings; it was an attempt at a record. “I work from the people that interest me and that I care about, in rooms that I live in and know. I use the people to invent my pictures with, and I can work more freely when they are there.”
Freud insisted that the subject matter of his work was autobiographical. “It’s all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really…I have watched behaviour change human forms. My horror of the idyllic, and a growing awareness of the limited value of recording visually observed facts has led me to work from people I know. Whom else can I hope to portray with any degree of profundity?”
Exceptional talent
Lucian — grandson of the great psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud — was known as a precocious talent even as a teenager. He was a star pupil in art school and worked alongside many big names. His meticulously detailed drawings were admired immensely; some of them were reproduced, along with the work of Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore, in the literary journal Horizon.
Freud held his first exhibition in 1944. When he was just 32, he was considered important enough to share the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1954) with Ben Nicholson (1894 — 1982) and Francis Bacon (1909 — 1992). Almost four decades later, he became a member of the Order of Merit.
Freud, who was once thrown out of school for dropping his trousers, also became famous for his eccentricities and unconventional behaviour. Notoriously withdrawn and shy of publicity, he refused to easily mingle or give interviews. He owned and used a telephone but did not give the number even to his close acquaintances. His friends knew that his boredom threshold was pretty low; to him, anything that was not work was ridiculous; and that he could not see the point of holidays.
Among his many models was his mother whom he painted repeatedly and thoughtfully, but refused to attend her funeral because he hated anything that involved duty or compulsion.
For a person who liked to ‘daydream’ in his spare time, he was for a long time addicted to gambling on horses, and gave it up only because “now I can afford to lose”. He married twice (and divorced both times) and had an active love life even in his advanced years.
He is said to have had several lovers and fathered dozens of children. He painted his daughters in the nude; they said it was the best way of being close to him.
Slow worker
For all the awe and adulation he and his work generated, Freud also had his share of critics who argued that he presented the bodies of his subjects very much as meat on a slab; that he liked flesh for flesh’s sake; and that he painted his nudes without any sense of compassion or even of warm sensuality. They were also appalled by the eternally noodling oozey surfaces, the incessantly teeming little paint-brush strokes, the limited palette of flesh tones, and his claustrophobic vision of naked models. A critic reviewing a Freud exhibition described him as painting flesh like badly carved ham.
Even his worst critics, however, admired Freud for steadfastly creating a vision and confidently persisting in whatever he did, without bothering to follow current trends and changing styles. They also saw that in spite of the astronomical prices his works commanded, he continued to work slowly and laboriously as ever — taking several months and even over a year to complete a portrait.
Freud also seemed to have a laid-back attitude towards riches, and always remained loyal to his dilapidated studio whose walls bore thick layers of paint which he would continually flick with a swipe. Writer, curator and critic Lawrence Gowing once recalled that Freud was the only artist he knew of, besides Cezanne, who wiped his brush clean after every stroke.
