Lucian Freud Mastered the Art of Lostness
As a National Portrait Gallery exhibition proves, he was especially good at depicting people painfully adrift from themselves.
LONDON — Death can be such a miserable nose-dive for any artist. Lucian Freud is deep into the 15th year of his posthumous life as a celebrated figurative painter. Where do the custodians of his reputation take him from here?
I am asking myself this question in London, where Lucian stalked abroad in his studio in the city’s W9 area, in his clumpy old boots, for so long, brushes all a-bristle. And, more particularly this morning, in the National Portrait Gallery, an institution that backs up against the National Gallery as if the two were a brace of vain aristocratic duelists. This place has shown Freud off to great effect, more than once within relatively recent memory. Does anyone want to hear the small, sweet tune played over again, this time a little more faintly?
What’s the big idea behind Drawing into Painting, a new show of about 170 of Freud’s pieces, then? What about digging deep into the archives, and pestering private collectors for their Lucianic riches? That is precisely what has happened. And the overarching theme? How drawing fed into his painting from first to last, and how print-making played a crucial role, too. We see some works that we already know far too well, but not that many, and several others that may pleasantly surprise us, some adjuncts, others off-cuts, and a few real gems.
Let’s think about what we knew relatively little about — the stuff of Lucian's childhood. The son of an architect, grandson of Sigmund, he was fleeted away from Germany in 1933 at the age of 11 like many Jewish children. Frank Auerbach and other artists had similar experiences.
The earliest drawings show off his passion for steamboats. There are also images of a birdhouse and flowers in a vase, all meticulously rendered. His 1940s portraits often possess a cold, forensic ferocity. A pen and ink on torn paper from 1941 called “The Village Boys” is particularly nasty. Several unruly kids appear to be scrapping on the ground in a rolled-up ball of rudeness and no-holds-barred pugnacity. Lucian seems to have relished the sight — quoted in the captions, he called them “weedy, nasty, but strange.” He’s very good at painting lostness, people painfully adrift from themselves.
But what about the man himself? He often treated women with contempt, and his behavior toward his own children could be questionable. Does any of that matter now? Should we care more than the experts seem to?
So many lovers and wives and ex-wives and children are shown off to good or ill effect in this show that it’s almost yawn-worthy, but some works do jump out at us. There is much brutality in the lumpish mottling of his wife Suzy Boyt’s beaten about nose in a painting improbably entitled “Woman Smiling.” Did she hate this picture as much as England’s queen must have hated her grim portrait, with her climbing jug-handles for hair? It was all grist to Freud’s mill. All that sounds ferociously, relentlessly studied, and icily technical. David Hockney was amazed that it took Freud 120 hours of scrutiny to capture him just so in 2002.
Freud never spares himself in his portraits either. If anything, he seems to be trying to discover just how repellently unknowable he can prove himself to be. Very seems to be the answer.
Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting continues at the National Portrait Gallery (St. Martin's Place, London, England) through May 4. The exhibition was curated by Sarah Howgate with David Dawson.
