Lucien Freud

Freud represents the modern brooding master reminiscent of a Michelangelo, whose battles with the pope have been replaced with an internal existentialist struggle for relevance. Having been quoted as saying, “I will paint myself to death”, Freud is working hard on doing just that. He has cast himself as the romantic hero for traditional two-dimensional mediums by painting well into his eighties with the same intensity of an inspired youth. Creating paintings that continue to remain challenging and ambitious in scale as well as complexity of form, Freud shows no indication of slowing down.

With such an oppressive sense of purpose, you have to question the quality of the work. With Freud, he seems never to disappoint, his observations are acute and he puts the necessary time in to penetrate a depth of figuration that takes years in some paintings. His process becomes about the relationship between artist and model as it evolves over time. The model is theatrical in the sense that as the painting evolves there is a change within them, they have to give something up to Freud, their vulnerability. Freud is the unbiased observer of that complex of human emotions as they shift continually throughout a session or sessions. It is a powerful role to play, and those who have been subjects of Freud’s paintings often shy away from the finished works, because they are too revealing (Lucien Freud: Portraits, 2004).

Formally, Freud’s work is lush and incredibly descriptive. Using cremnitz white to great effect he captures the physical textures within the composition, as well as the quality of light pervading the forms. Flesh in Freud’s paintings is breathtaking in its depiction, every nuance accounted for and represented accordingly. There is an overall approach to representation in each painting, a blanket carries as much work as a figure. This creates a harmony within a composition and helps to communicate the space, and conditions of that space with specificity. The studio that these are painted in, in that regard, becomes a subject in itself that carries on between paintings. A ridge of soiled rags, or a couch that seems worked over by continual sittings, returns us to the idea that painting can transcend an individual work, and become about an ideology.

Freud represents an aspect of art that seems to be rare these days, the physical embodiment of an ideal. You cannot help but be effected by the finality of that. When Freud is gone, he will take a piece of painting with him. Like De Kooning painting into his nineties suffering from Alzheimer’s, Freud is creating a symbol for artists to look up to. In a world where making art is possibly the ultimate absurdity, he shows us just how powerful a statement it can be. That painting can reveal ideas that are as poignant as a contemporary book on physics or psychology, it is inspiring.