Lucian Freud Retrospective In Retrospective
Illustration by Richard Phoenix: www.richardphoenix.tumblr.com
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The Lucian Freud Retrospective was the reason for, and worth, the nine hour coach journey to Paris. Each canvas I’d ever seen by Lucian Freud had held such remarkably different stories across class and time, discordant textures and combinations of colour that ineffably meld that I’d always classified him as a genius and master of flesh. Even the clothed subjects give the impression that they are actually naked under their cardboard clothes. They all wear, wherever they perch or lay, a silky tunic of light, fitted perfectly in a sheen over the right parts. It’s draped over them from above to bring their pink bodies to life, fit snugly over rib cages, thighs, shoulders, throats, noses, cheekbones and foreheads. Close up they are unnerving car-crashes of meat, from a distance these portraits are completely lifelike.
Temporary giant broken birdhouses with spilling nests gave away the Pompidou Centre. The building, like a lot of modern Parisian architecture, plays on inversion; draining and structural guts crawl all over it, a series of escalators like a massive water-flume is clipped to the building’s exterior. From the Sacré Coeur later in the day, the gallery would look like a stepladder in a field. The short film about Freud prepping a painting session we watched out of choice before entering the exhibition proper; a naked man and dog out on the floor, great heat burning at the window, comments about plants and flowers coming into bloom, the obvious punctuation of nakedness hitting their chatter. Freud appears old but strong, squeezing out paint onto a palette, smooth squeeze-and-scrapes, using bright colours you couldn’t imagine actually going onto the painting. The model swivels the canvas around to be nearer to Freud and the bright window and the film cuts out just as he’s about to put the first dab of paint onto the canvas. The dog lies still and the model is comfortable, shaking out his hand to ready it for long periods of rest.
This exhibition was a marathon without a warm up. It immediately struck you in the face with its sleepy violence. Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, the painting of the infamously fat woman with eyes closed across a couch with skin that looks pinched and pressed, appears with bite marks all over her body, skin rested flake by flake with a paintbrush like gold leaf. She’s made of bruised putty stretched with a dirty hand smudging her skin, and has feet flattened from the weight of pink paint. Up close his women are unrecognisable and battered, broken-limbed. Too close and they break up, but from afar they are cool and smooth, seamless, moist, with limbs softly lolling. The chair leaning unsteadily, retreating from the same David and Eli from the film at the start of the exhibition, totters to bring the painting into a third dimension. There are Cubist touches in the chair legs, and you peer down on the plant pot on the chair while simultaneously peering at it. David, the co-subject alongside Eli the whippet, is assuredly a gentleman from his many layers of icecream skin; a face of pure angles, as gritty as the soil in the plant pot. It’s as if Eli’s licked his face, removed some skin, given him back a lick of paint. Now here are two Irishmen, a father and son. They have bodies full of blood, you can see blue pockets of it in their faces. They wear stiff crepe paper suits which are almost transparent, hardly capable of covering their naked vulnerability.
Freud’s self-portraits range from hilarious to traumatic. He can be comically and happily naked in painting stance, or only veins and bones with hatched skin braided to his collarbone. His face is all stitched up like a thrown together sackcloth mask, milky with chalky rivers running in the creases. The way he sees his subjects, himself included, is similar to how I see people when I’m drunk, when you notice all the very slight components of their flesh, their veins, individual hairs. The extent of concentration you only get rarely and unusually, giving his works a sense of occasion. No one is seen in this level of clarity unless designated this attention for a reason; these bodies have had hundreds of hundreds of hours spent on them. It reminded me of those love poems by the Metaphysical, where they explain that if they could spend a thousand years on describing all the parts of their lover they could get it right. If they were paintings they’d be Freud portraits. Maybe Freud portraits show the ridiculousness of these idealistic poems, showing that if you did spend hours and hours on certain aspects of someone it starts to become monstrous, so unnatural in its naturalness, overwrought but completely in focus in a light so soft and clear that it refreshes but unnerves you.
The final room has, thankfully, only a small selection of photos; the mint after a meal. A picture of Freud’s studio defines my theme for the exhibition. An entire wall of the attic room where he used to work has dozens of layers of paint, as if he’d flayed the wall to death to work out colours that complement each other through accidental and experimental means. It would have taken literally years of frantic movement to create this frozen, multi-coloured television static, just as it took Freud months or years to get down his subjects and objects. Men and women whose skin is decayed like dried bird shit, trees that hold green leaves but are deadwood, a strangely muscled child lying stiffened on a tilting floor: just as Barthes told us that photography shows that which is dead and in the past, Freud’s work shows moments lost and youth spent. It is death tricking you that it’s life.
Paris 2010
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This piece originally appeared in Issue 3 of Shebang magazine: www.shebang-mag.co.uk
