ANALYZING FREUD

Doesn't Lucian Freud's work kind of stick in your craw? For many people, it can be sort of a love/hate thing. His work is certainly not lovable and yet the distastefulness is part of what makes it riveting. Certainly these days no one objects to what some artists and critics in America initially saw as conservative or regressive in his work. But though many of his admirers are wowed by his technical acumen, to a painter, it is not Freud's facility that impresses.

No, what was startling to young American painters first encountering his work in the late 1980's wasn't his technical skill, it was the perversity of his vision, a perversity that quietly seeped through the brushstrokes into the gaze they constructed. It was the way he makes us stare at things we are not sure we want to see. It was also the bold attempt, after a half century of modern painting, to convey the material, temporal and sexual presence of a human being, and still have it all be just paint on canvas. It felt like he took the modernist imperative of truth in packaging into reverse overdrive. We still got the truth of the formal construction, but we also got a level of signification that wasn't available to painting at that time. In their rejection of modernist conventions, the paintings seemed daring.

As usual in art, it wasn't the feat really, but the deceptive ordinariness of it that seemed so compelling—and the poignancy of the failure. Empiricism will always be doomed to fail to capture the dynamic reality of the world. There is too much information seen from too many points of view. But what an empirical process can do is to produce an ambiguous narrative, within a fiction of verisimilitude. Freud's paintings didn't try to mirror reality like a photograph, but in the breakdown of the representation, in the unreliable subjectivity of the narrative, the nature of consciousness can become visible.

But lately the work has become troubling in a different way. The balance has tipped. In recent years, the artificiality of Freud's constructs has somehow overtaken the implicit pathos of the failure of his process. We have become very aware of the circumstance of the subject. Aware that the painting we are seeing is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth or a pregnant Kate Moss or the famous performance artist Leigh Bowery (now deceased from AIDS). The bizarre absurdity of a hairy, bare-chested man suckling a baby or a morbidly obese naked woman asleep on a couch does not make us question the process of representation in the same way that earlier the ambiguity of a plane of color made us wonder if we were seeing a hideous scar, or just an aberration of pigment. The perversity of subject has triumphed over the perversity of representation.

We live in an age of celebrity. Perhaps his current paintings merely embody that, and maybe the shift in focus in the paintings from the quotidian to the exalted is only irritating to an earlier generation. Initially it didn't seem to matter that he was Sigmund Freud's grandson. This was just an interesting biographical fact that highlighted the possibility of a psychological reading. It also enabled a dedicated painter working in a debased painting mode to be taken seriously. Now it kind of seems an inextricable component of the romantic genius legend. Maybe these days our awareness of Lucian Freud, the great artist, the inheritor of the Freud brand necessarily comes before the work, not from it. His work felt more compelling when he seemed merely a contender.

What exactly has changed? It's not easy to approach painting today with merely a simple appreciation. Coming to grips with contemporary painting, means wading through a morass of opposing points of view, and shifting levels of irony, which are themselves the product of changing class distinctions, conflicting modernist and postmodernist ideology and the sheer force and romantic glamour of the art marketplace. Contemplating Freud's work brings all of these divergent forces into play, and trying to unpack one's own reaction, not just as a viewer, but as a painter as well, illuminates all the difficulties of our current situation.

In the late 80's, primarily because of the AIDS crisis, the body had replaced the figure as a preferred intellectual art term. Illness and pathology made the idea of corporeality compelling, and although photography was the prime recipient of this critical attention, the metaphor of paint as flesh helped revive an interest in how the act of painting could overcome death of painting pronouncements now that death of humans seemed a more poignant concern.

Freud was already in his sixties by then. There had been a retrospective in '88 of Freud's work, that had traveled to the Hirschorn Museum in Washington DC. But for a New York painter, his work was difficult to come by. If a critic or curator mentioned his work, there was no Google image search, one had to look for a book.

Most of his work was in private collections and there were simply no paintings to be seen unless one was in London during an exhibition. The new edition of the Lawrence Gowing monograph, first published in paperback in 1984 had just come out in 1988, it covered his whole career until about 1982 though many of the reproductions were not then in color. This was followed in quick succession in 1989 by an almost identical book with more color reproductions of the same paintings in addition to new paintings going up to 1987 and a Robert Hughes essay.

Looking through the Gowing book, one skimmed through the early work, which, though sometimes compelling, mostly seemed derivative and embarrassingly sentimental. The first color reproduction that was really arresting was Naked Girl, 1966. What was immediately compelling, was the role of detail in the image, the insistent sexuality, and the way it was painted. Details of flesh were created by details of paint, and while it seemed fresh, he had been doing it for twenty years already when it was first seen here.

By the 1960s, Freud had learned to create specific body details through the action of the paint. Without rendering individual hairs he could create the feeling of hair by dragging a bristle brush of wet pigment into the lighter wet color that was representing flesh. Using a ghostly build-up of previous layers to snag a tuft of wet bristles he could make a clump of paint into pubic hair. He painted creases in bodies by abutting masses of lighter pigment against a deep alizarin, rather than drawing them with a fine brush. All this seemed to occur spontaneously, created in the moment. He was no longer illustrating details like in his earlier painting but simply making the action of the paint become the details. This was detail that was truly modern because it made bodies specific rather than fantasies. It violated canon because it was produced with a subjective brush, and didn't have the distanced, mechanical dispassion of the photographic that seemed mandatory in painting at the time.

Naked Girl, 1966, taking up an entire page, looks huge, though the painting turns out to be only about twice as large as the reproduction. We are presented with the image of a naked blonde woman in the middle of the canvas isolated on a white sheet colored by the tones and shades that incandescent light produces. It is hard to determine the degree of attractiveness of her face or her body, because of the harsh lighting and the angle from which she is viewed. Foreshortened, her legs are cropped at the knees, and she is depicted as if we are hovering over her from the foot of a bed, the light raking her body from in front at the same angle. It is as if we have become the light showering down on her like Zeus on Danae.

Both hands are curled slightly, the right one resting back above her shoulders near her head, and the other on its side on her breast just above her erect left nipple. Although her legs are not spread, her pubic hair reveals (is it really there?) her parted pink vulva only just a slight degree of tone and of a thickness different than its surroundings. The mastery of subtle tonal difference, by the way, is a key to painting bodies and light. She is not painted possessing the direct gaze of Manet's Olympia , but not with a 19 th Century demure, averted gaze either. Mostly she seems like her attention has wandered just slightly.

What's fascinating here are the hierarchies the various details occupy in this painting and the gaze they construct. First because the details are not rendered but created through the actions of paint, her body is not really eroticized as being offered up for our delectation. Although we can see her sex, it is painted matter-of-factly, and barely visible though not obscured. The dark valley where her two legs press together does create a line that starts at the bottom of the painting and leads right up to it. But it isn't emphasized in the painting or privileged, over, say, her hands, which are constructed finger by finger. Each finger curled against her palm with just a particular amount of pressure, specific enough to create an idea of expression and therefore of personality.

It is hard to read her body language, she seems passive but slightly guarded and in control. Even the way Freud depicts the wandering of her attention through the very specific focus of her eyes, attaches an illusion of awareness to this person, an awareness that resists easy possession by the viewer. And look at her eyes! If you look at the eyes he gives people in his early works such as in John Minton, 1952 you get every eyelash and every reflection and tonal change and pupil angle, but those eyes seem lifeless. In Naked Girl, though the eyes seem quickly jotted down, they imply a specific focus and even movement, as if they were caught in mid-glance. This is where the true virtuosity in Freud lies. Not in his skill of depiction, any good artist could do that. It is the way he orders the details to orchestrate our attention. This orchestration is emphatic yet only made visible in our reaction to it.

There is narrative breakdown. Maybe this is a depiction of a naked woman on a bed waiting to be fucked. But it is also a clinical view of a woman lying naked on a sheet-covered platform in an intensely lit artist's studio. She could be on an examining table. It is the troubling clash between subjectivity and objectivity in this painting that undermines an easy pornography. There is a struggle for a viewer about where and what to look at. Freud is painting a nakedness that includes the whole person, that doesn't stop below the neck. We want to stare at the woman's sex and how it arises out of the paint, but are constantly diverted by the language of her face and hands. We examine this painting at the same time we are examining her. It is the eroticism of the clinic, of playing doctor in the studio.

Naked Girl, 1966 was a provocation for figurative painting in New York in the late 1980's. What it challenged was the conventional wisdom about what representational painting could do, while still feeling of its time. It was a provocation that paved the way for an artist like John Currin a decade later. But for now let's compare Freud with the two other doyens of figurative painting in New York then, Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein.

Although then still peripheral to the mainstream of contemporary painting, Katz and Pearlstein had both sought to strip their work of the psychological and humanistic constructs, that in the New York art world, would have consigned them to the Siberia of traditionalist figuration. Katz managed a suave figure-based urbanity using heroic scale, flattened space, and the high-keyed color of pop art, combined with a spontaneous but deadpan facture. Pearlstein had rejected every manifestation of feeling or content with a complete lack of flourish in the paint strokes. This guaranteed a totally unsentimental objectivity and a unique position, but drained his paintings of sexuality. In Lucian Freud existed everything they had jettisoned in order to be taken seriously, but his Englishness and pedigree allowed him to be seen as peculiar rather than reactionary. Interestingly enough though, all three painters have the peripheral cultural quality that comes with being secularly Jewish, especially Freud who even today retains his German accent even though he emigrated when he was only eleven. All three were accepted as members of the art club, but each stayed close to the door.

But the really special quality that Lucien Freud brought to this stew was perversity. Perversity is at the heart of postmodernism, which dominated cultural thought in the 1980's, because it deconstructs acceptability. Since it has to do its initial work in the closet, it is a quality that allows art to be subversive, when every part of our culture works to package and contain it within the confines of a product in the marketplace. Labeling something as perverse is an attempt to separate it from the pack. It is the dying gasp of the established trying to preserve its position. There is always a moment in the culture when that which has been repressed returns with a vengeance and it was a moment such as this when Freud's paintings became significant to American art.

Postmodernism in the1980's opened the door on perversity. Balthus suddenly became an important artist, Otto Dix began to appear in museums. The outsider work of Henry Darger was discovered. Eric Fischl and David Salle came to the fore as painters; both dealing with nakedness in ways that chewed at the edges of acceptable taste. Then of course there was Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, anal sex, body fluids, tattoos and piercing all becoming visibly insistent when the AIDS epidemic could no longer be ignored. This was what prepared the New York art world for Lucian Freud.

It is in the construction of the close and insistent gaze that is at the heart of the pervy edge in Freud's painting. It's there even when the subject is clothed. It is there in the mountains of used paint rags in his backgrounds or the drippy infected faucets in the slop sinks that find his way into his studio compositions, or out the window in views of garbage strewn back lots. It takes an intensity of observation to make such minute adjustments to the surface of a painting and Freud knows how to build these images fluidly but aware of each atom. I like that Freud knows how to give men a sexual presence even when they are clothed. Take Guy and Speck, 1980/81, for example, and compare it to Naked man with rat, 1977.  

Both paintings depict men in a sexualized way, though it is with a very different means depending on whether they are clothed or naked. When they are clothed, men seem to be bursting out of their clothing, there is almost the threat of violence like a contained explosion. While when they are naked, the men seem passive and slightly sad. Freud has said that he only paints men naked who are gay, “because of their courage.” But I think it is because he can observe them intimately without being afraid of the effect of his gaze on their masculine energy. Freud is a top who is perhaps uneasily tantalized by the idea of being a bottom.

In Guy and Speck (is Guy the man or the dog?) the man seems to barely be able to keep his dog constrained. One paw of the dog shoots out between the man's fingers like an erect cock, the other forepaw stiff between the man's leg, and his snout resting on his crotch, the dog's mouth in a vaginal smile. The dog's lower legs are cropped right below his pink genitalia. The man's hand clutches tightly around the dog's body as if to bridle a volatility, and Freud gives expression to every vein and sinew in that hand. The swollen purplish thumb, painted with sharp angular edges stands out against the dog's white fur. Compared to this hand, the other hand is almost soft and passive, relaxed and almost edgeless against the ochre fabric of the couch. And the man's head, tilted back with slitted eyes and piercing arrogant gaze, is visually connected to his crotch with stripes of black tie and blue shirt. If this man were naked, the situation would be crackling with homoeroticism. As it is, the picture is almost perverse in the way Freud barely contains the energy within conventional heterosexual boundaries.

Naked man with rat, 1977, deals with male sexual energy in a more seductively creepy way. Here we have a naked man reclining into the corner of a couch (the same one from Guy and Speck,) his head leaning back, and looking at the ceiling with an expression that only could be described as existential dread. His left hand open in a gesture of surrender, lies back near his neck. His knees are fully bent one resting on the back of the couch, and one on the seat, feet nestled together, fully exposing his red pubic hair, flaccid penis, with articulated orange scrotum resting against his ass. Most amazingly, his right hand, which lies across his belly, reaches to gently grasp a black rat, legs outstretched trying to escape, whose tail extends up over and across the man's inner left thigh resting an inch below his penis. Hidden in the shadows in the lower right corner we can just make out the erect wooden phallus of the couch's foot as it contacts the floor.

This may lack the obvious perversity of a homoerotic Mapplethorpe scene, but from the particular, tender way Freud paints the man's genitalia and extremities to the look on his face, this is quite a far cry from Philip Pearlstein as well. Freud, in the way he articulates the way the man's penis droops down to touch his leg, the way the man's feet nestle together, the particular delicate grasp of the little black rat (I think you get the metaphor) makes us imagine the feeling of every moment of this man's body. It is a terrific invasion of privacy of both the subject and the viewer and in its creepy vision it fully anticipates the interests of artists in the late 80's, and Jenny Saville, Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin, in the late 90's. Perhaps the work's closest cousin would be the American painter Alice Neel who also arrives from the margins to prominence in the late 80's New York art scene. The arrival of Freud's vision in New York introduced a whole range of ideas that had not been dealt with in figurative painting. The appearance of an appropriated Naked Girl, 1966 in a David Salle painting of the 90's makes this clear.

It was also in the 80's that Freud started to cross the line between pervy representation to pervy subject matter. Painting his daughters without clothes was pretty edgy— edgy, but squarely within the purview of his work. They must really love their dad…or something. Family as subject is a hallmark of the figurative tradition. Revealing the intimate naked moments of your progeny steps right to the edge of that line. It would have been more impressive if he had gotten his old aristocratic mom, looking sad and rheumy-eyed and slightly disapproving in the portraits he did of her, to strip for his brush. He played with the idea of ordinariness in female bodies all the time: young and old, buxom, flat-chested, svelte, and fleshy to the point of perhaps obesity. All were subjects for examination and challenged our notion of what an ordinary human actually looked like.

Not so much with men, however, unless they were clothed. The naked men's bodies are all kind of conventionally thin with not too much muscular definition, until we get to the Leigh Bowery paintings. The problem of the Leigh Bowery paintings is the way Freud seems to suddenly monumentalize his body, instead of presenting it in the context of the constructed ordinary moment. He points to it as amazing yet freakish, instead of making us question if it were merely a little out of the ordinary.

This is such a contrast to Naked self-portrait, 1982 . Freud depicts his aging naked body in all its abject pathos. The fact that he's wearing these open, laceless, decrepit boots only heightens the abjection. He paints his body as still muscular, arms sinewy, though softening in the belly, with flaccid but not small cock and holding in one hand a palette smeared with the excremental colors his body is composed of and in the other hand wielding a painting knife instead of a brush, gripping it gently like a feather. But he saves his greatest sarcasm for his own face. Darkened, wrinkled, clotted with paint boogers, his hair in unruly tufts, his head sits atop his body with an expression of satanic disgust. It is a painting of a man confronting his own disintegration and death.

At its best, Freud's work plays with one's disgust of quotidian experience. The moles, acne, sores, body hair, all the irregularities of a body as it exists in real time and space, before it is airbrushed and glamorized, all find their counterpart in Freud's paint. The paint becomes blobby and edges become rough from over-painting. This is where Freud's paint handling itself is perverse. It is a shock to see an actual Lucian Freud painting in person. The dusty dryness of the paint, which looks slick when reproduced on glossy paper stock, is shockingly unattractive to American eyes accustomed to the confident facture of Alex Katz or deKooning. We see rethought areas in all their clumsiness with thin layers over thick, and sometimes the inconvenient ghosts of previous edges. But this is still good. It challenges what we think of as a proper surface for a painting.

What's disturbing is when the scenario starts to replace the mise-en-scene, when the paintings start to become theatrical. Just because every painting is painted “from life,” from actual people holding a pose, doesn't make it real. In fact, in Freud's case it has begun to stand in the way. Restaging an entire tableau for each sitting seems a waste and instead of bodies forced to become expressive through repeated paintings, multiple models tend to make the paintings frozen. That the people in his paintings are actually relating to each other is an obvious fiction anyways, to have them all there in the studio at the same time seems redundant.

Painter and model, 1986/7 is an early case in point. There is a reclining naked man, legs spread, facing us on a tattered couch. Entering stage left is a blond woman with a downward pensive gaze, in a paint besmeared red smock holding a brush. On the floor is a scattered pile of used brushes and tubes of paint, on one of which the woman is stepping. The tube seems to be oozing sap green paint onto the floor. When this painting first appeared it was intriguing. It pointed to narrative possibilities we hadn't yet considered. But today the phallic paint tube ejaculation narrative seems too banal as an idea. This is where Freud begins his journey over the line. Over the line not of good taste, that never was there, but over the line from the construction of a peculiar lived moment into the construction of overly symbolic theatrical narrative.

Now, there are many things to like about in this painting, the way the floor is painted, the space of the room, the idea of painting a smock that is smeared with paint, and of course Freud's handling of the figures. Even the girl's toes touching the crumpled tubes could have given the painting a moment if sensual particularity. All of those are ideas that arise in the painting, while the squirting paint tube is an idea imposed on the painting to make it “interesting” which in fact makes it tiresome. This is where the paintings begin to stick in one's craw. Or is this just the effect of the way Freud's paintings refuse to adhere to any ideologies?

And so we are back to the beginning. The very qualities that made Freud's work attractive to the revisionist post-modern sensibilities of the 80's perhaps have come to represent an ideology that has passed. Maybe a new generation lacking that postmodern baggage may find the newer work to be provocative to the very aesthetics that the older work helped form. The disconcerting theatricality that has embodied the work of the last few decades may once again come to seem a refreshing rejection of an established aesthetic ideology. Freud is once again either a relic of the past or an omen of the future.

©Dennis Kardon, 2009