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Art review: Lucian Freud at the National Gallery and Friends and Relations at Gagosian

by
09 December 2022

Nicholas Cranfield sees exhibitions for Lucian Freud’s centenary

© The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2022/Bridgeman Images

Lucian Freud, Self-portrait (Fragment), 1956, oil on canvas, private collection, in the National Gallery exhibition

Lucian Freud, Self-portrait (Fragment), 1956, oil on canvas, private collection, in the National Gallery exhibition

UNDOUBTEDLY the two greatest artists of the last century who came to dominate artistic representation in England and to reclaim figurative painting were rank outsiders.

Born to English parents in Dublin in 1909, Francis Bacon, like the younger German Lucian Freud from Berlin, was subject to a range of indifferent English boarding schools. Both men survived a succession of scandals and sexual adventures, although neither really fitted in, and both preferred to live and love along the boundaries.

In the second room of the National Gallery exhibition, which offers new perspectives on the younger of the two in his centenary year, we are privileged to come face to face with both, side by side. The self-portrait (fragment) of 1956 is larger (measuring 61 × 61cm) than the oil and charcoal sketch of Francis Bacon from the same period (35.5 × 35.5 cm). It is the very nature of the unfinished state which makes such a powerful statement. These could be fragments from the early Italian Renaissance or the wooden remains of Fayum portraits.

© The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2022/ Bridgeman ImagesLucian Freud, The Brigadier, 2003-04, oil on canvas, private collection, in the National Gallery exhibition  

Freud has chosen to depict himself with his hands scratching his cheeks or maybe holding his face up. Bacon looks down, not addressing the artist and perhaps intentionally avoiding his interlocutor. It was never finished. Bacon shot off to travel abroad, but Freud may have intended to leave it non finito.

The Bacon may have served as sketch for the portrait that was owned by the Tate and stolen when it was exhibited in a British Council exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1988. Both painters had friends in common, many of whom were crooks and aristocrats. No doubt that hampered any attempt at finding the missing portrait long before the Berlin Wall came down.

At Grosvenor Hill, in Richard Calvocoressi’s staggering show for Gagosian, Freud and Bacon are reunited, together with Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews. They fell in and out of friendships, drank deeply at the Colony Room in 1960s Soho, and variously inspired, and sparred with, one another.

Two other portraits, which are in fact not paired together at Trafalgar Square but will be subconsciously linked by the viewer there, are much more widely known.

The first was the royal commission for a Diamond Jubilee portrait of Her Late Majesty the Queen in 2001. She made no secret that she did not enjoy being painted by Freud with honesty and invasive intelligence over nine sittings. While many of her opinions remain private, we understand that she quipped that at least he had not painted her in the nude.

The diminutive portrait of her head (23.5 × 15.2 cm) is simply about flesh. It is her face that commands, as the spectacular crown, rendered more directly, her earrings, and three ropes of pearls become accessories of little value. It is a profoundly intimate portrait of the unknowable and unknown monarch, and a hundred times better than so many commissioned daubs from her 70-year reign.

In the same Jubilee year of 2002, that other national treasure David Hockney (private collection) sat to the artist for more than 100 hours. His portrait head is hung next to that of the Queen. Instantly recognisable (even with his clothes on, unlike his earlier forays into film), it shows how Freud painstakingly worked to let all his subjects live and breathe.

The other portrait that will receive, if nothing more, a moment of esteem from a nation still obsessed with Diana, Princess of Wales, is simply entitled The Brigadier (private collection). It is in the final room at the National Gallery and commands the enfilade as visitors walk towards it through the seven galleries that, broadly chronological, cover seven decades.

Painted in 2003 or 2004, this depicts Andrew Parker Bowles with rather more on his mind than simply sitting for a portrait. The first husband of the Queen Consort is barely able to hold his military stance. He is seated in a chair, placed some four feet below the artist’s brush. Although he is wearing full dress uniform, it is unbuttoned, and he appears as if he is a roué, recovering after a night out drinking to console himself in the collapse of his marriage.

© the estate of michael andrews/tate. photo mike bruceMichael Andrews, The Colony Room I, 1962, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, on show in the Gagosian exhibition

Freud is an artist who frequently came into the National Gallery, often outside opening hours, saying that it was “rather like going to doctor for help”.

He never acknowledged the debt that he paid to previous artists, although, in a wonderfully back-handed joking remark made to the then director of the National Gallery, after long looking at a landscape painting by Constable, he remarked that he had failed to appreciate how much Constable was indebted to Max Ernst. Constable died in 1837; Ernst, who inspired the young Freud in Berlin, was not born until 1891.

The 1993 self-portrait Reflection shows him standing in his studio full length. He is naked and brandishes a palette knife in his right hand and a palette is held in his left. The pose echoes Michelangelo’s Saint Bartholomew in the Sistine Chapel, where the martyr holds his attributes of a knife and his own skin. Freud never used a palette knife in his own painting, so this deliberately makes us look at flesh as life.

Although there are works on paper, including two early self-portraits of 1948, in which fronds of his hair are depicted like foliage in watercolour in the first room, and the graphite and pencil drawings of his mother, alive in 1983 and dead in 1989, hanging in sepulchral gloom in a shrine-like side room, the National exhibition of 64 works is principally one that is given over to oil paintings.

Thank goodness, as this is where Freud excels. The head of his friend Frank Auerbach, painted in 1975-76, or of one of his mistresses with a whippet in her arms (Double Portrait, 1985-86) speak volumes of paint and of flesh on a monumental scale, long before he began painting his oversized models, one the performance artist Leigh Bowery and the other a benefits supervisor, Sue Tilley.

It was Freud’s profound wish that a retrospective might be held in the nation’s premier gallery. His long-term friend and associate David Dawson providing generous advice, this wish has finally been brought to bear in the year marking the centenary by Daniel F. Herrmann, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Projects at the National, in collaboration with Paloma Alarcó, Chief Curator of Modern Painting.

There are many bons mots in what he claimed to be his inspiration, but he picked up on a line of W. B. Yeats, “Only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind — sex and death,” a line he apparently used repeatedly.

There is a great deal of flesh as the oft-married artist took up with mistresses. Latterly, he enjoyed painting gay men and their lovers, but all are portrayed with the same generosity of observation which he had brought to his study of the Queen. We see, and indeed feel, the mischief behind much of Lucian Freud’s painting, but also the dedicated and deep introspective sense of an artist who engaged with his sitters.

Is Man in a Blue Shirt from 1965 (private collection, courtesy of Ordovas), his troubled portrait of Bacon’s lover George Dyer (1934-71), who took his own life, evading our glance? Are the studies of Leigh Bowery confrontational or redemptive?

© estate of Francis bacon. All rights reserved, DACS 2022Francis Bacon, Head of a Man, 1960, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of Anglia, Norwich, in the Gagosian exhibition

In Bowery’s case, he had stripped naked when he entered the studio before Freud had even discussed how he might portray him. Certainly, there is a brashness of depiction; maybe that is what our late Sovereign Lady did not like.

The National offers a majestic exhibition, and, if not all the essays offer new perspectives on Freud, it is the art of the century, and will show well in Madrid.

Seven other London galleries host significant centenary shows: Gagosian, Ordovas, Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, and Lyndsey Ingram, as well as the Freud Museum and the Garden Museum, housed in the former church of St Mary at the gatehouse of Lambeth Palace, long since secularised, which gives visitors to the Archbishop one view of what the Church of England thinks of its built heritage.

At Gagosian, the sheer power of Freud comes out by comparison; his 1952 nude study of Henrietta Morales sitting in a Paddington window faces a Bacon triptych of the same model painted in 1969, each vying for our attention as we leave the first great room that holds Freud’s portrait of the owner of Wheeler’s restaurant, who brazenly knows he is successful, his studio window view painted 20 years later (1970-72) over a run-down Paddington mews, and the naked self-portrait, Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening (1967-68), canvases that each provoke an intense response and attention from the view.

Each show is a fitting tribute to this extraordinary artist who kept painting to the very end; the unfinished Portrait of the Hound is a sober reminder that ‘Art is long, life is short’.

 

“Lucian Freud: New Perspectives” is at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2, until 22 January 2023. Phone 020 7747 2885. www.nationalgallery.org.uk

At the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, 14 February to 18 June 2023. Phone 00 34 917 91 13 70. www.museothyssen.org

“Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews” is at Gagosian, 20 Grosvenor Hill, London W1, until 28 January 2023. Phone 020 7495 1500. gagosian.com

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