Lucian Freud, master realist painter of our times, died yesterday at the age of 88. Born in Berlin in 1922, the artist was a grandson of Sigmund Freud (an interesting biographical fact, although it’s hard to say exactly what it might mean in terms of the paintings). With his well-to-do family, he moved to Britain in 1933 to escape Hitler. Freud said, “My work is purely autobiographical. It is about myself and my surroundings.” Yet like all painters who paint within the confines of the studio, Freud controlled those surroundings. His famous, frequently large paintings of super-sized nudes—especially those of the huge, almost grotesquely formed performance artist Leigh Bowery, painted in the 1990s (see the full-sized portrait of Bowery, posted to the left)—result not from accidental poses captured by the artist, but from intensely pre-determined set-ups. The full or partial nudes stand or sit purposefully on the model’s stand, or recline in seemingly unselfconscious, if repugnant, displays of their own bodies.
Freud’s paint handling seems to miraculously turn paint into flesh. His pictures owe a lot to the great English painter Sir Stanley Spencer. Actually, all painters who move thick paint around in a way that makes it seem as if it’s not paint, but real physical flesh, ultimately claim roots in Rembrandt and Velázquez. But where those two painting giants retrieved human dignity from out of its fleshly variations, Freud carried on in the more brutal, modern understanding of flesh—an approach that amounts to saying, “Nothing to do about it; we’re stuck in these things called bodies.”
Freud also took an awful lot from Francis Bacon (surely one of the scariest painters ever), who exhibited with him at the 1954 Venice Biennale, and whose portrait he painted in 1952. Although Bacon used thin, flat fields of paint, punctuating it with bouts of thick, spontaneous blobs, both artists understood the modern condition as a combination of the horrible and the tragic. Both, with shocking ruthlessness, depicted exactly what they saw.
