Arts
No more sugar-coating
John McEwen
Lucian Freud's new paintings are hung (till 6 November) in the larger of An- thony d'Offay's premises, the spacious and clinical warehouse conversion at 23 Dering Street, WI, where normally the work of the gallery's 'modern' artists is displayed. Much of this work has taken the fashionable form of wallop and bombast, and the stark individualism of Freud's pain- tings, intensified by the starkness of the setting, severs the memory of such preten- sion at a stroke. It is painting of experience not affect, narrowed to the point of its pre- sent intention, as hard as the other (at least in so many contemporary hands) is soft.
Freud, on his own admission, realised by the age of 15 that he had little natural talent for drawing or painting, but with stubborn persistence he negated the lack of it. Lack of talent for a thing is a handicap like any other. It must be compensated for, and this compensation, this trying as hard as possi- ble without letting it show, always gives the efforts of handicapped people a certain ten- sion. It also gives them a surreal understan- ding of the problem overcome. In Freud's painting this surreal quality — nothing to do with the artistic use of surreal, more with its transcendent sense — is augmented by the social handicap (at least in the inter- pretative world of art) of his being the grandson of Sigmund Freud and, indeed, the nephew of the recently dead Anna Freud. It makes his autobiographical art (almost every one of his paintings records someone of significance to his life) pecu- liarly self-alert — alert, that is, to literary misinterpretation, to artistic method and context as well as the object of his interest. Over the years he has done many self- portraits, including a melodramatic naked `head-and-shoulders' in the present exhibi- tion, but none of them captures his alert- ness so well as the glimpse of his legs, also here, skipping out of the top right-hand corner of a painting otherwise devoted to a naked girl. The tension and clarity of Freud's painting has been sustained through an evermore risky avoidance of cliche and classification, both of technique and genre, as he skips clear of repetition or opposition, gaining success through an accumulation of increasingly formalist points rather than with the knockout displays of hair's breadth detail that won him prizes as a young man.
As a self-made painter Freud dislikes any mark of inherited ease in the making of paintings, no bravura showing-off or delicate French touches, little so obviously satisfying as a smooth surface any more. Some years ago he abandoned brushes of
pliant sable fur for the coarse rigidity 0.1. hog's bristle, and now he can blind us toIns growing refinement, his technical facility, by scrubbing paint on, when he so chooses, like a beginner. Adoption of a thick white pigment, the most noticeable technical change in these new paintings, adds lull' piness to this repertoire of deceits. Close uP his surfaces can now look like battlefields, but with the benefit of the longer views Pro; vided at 23 Dering Street, the artifice 01 these apparent crudities is brought into focus. Wider implications, of course, are no less contradictory. The paintings identify the, sitter, but the sitters are invariably stripped (often literally) of any of the accoutrements of portraiture. He is a naturalist, but not In the sense of being deliberately unflattering, a realist, but without a trace of political consciousness or moral rectitude. A `bir,d, lying at the foot of some foliage confoullu', the genre by being a dead bat; a rat clutched near the genitals of a young man in a pain- ting among the work of a mixture of artists at Anthony d'Offay's smaller gallery .(9 Dering Street, W1, till 16 October), defies symbolism by its very obviousness. So does the slowly disintegrating couch on which most of his sitters recline. The depiction or i `portrayal' (as he likens it) of these n' variably naked and female sitters is detach- ed but certainly not uninvolved, clinical (another aspect emphasised by the nevi gallery) but not unerotic. He can mark, even foretell, the passage of emotion and experience in a face, guarding his sitters right to independence as scrupulously as his own. And yet he also seems to become more mercilessly puritanical with the years' eschewing colour and tenderness in these new paintings almost equally. His tones tend to be a mid-European stew of bacon pinks, sausage browns, dumpling greys and gristle blues; their salt calling for sotne. sweetness from former days: a freshness of flowers, an untarnished body, a lick of sable, perhaps, to salve so much scabrous bristle; although it cannot be denied that' i with the exception of the small 'Woman n profile', the few softer things here prove some of the least successful. Two portraits of a terrier-like man with a terrier seem best to suit the new toughness of technique. Meanwhile a glaring fault of design, like the Wells inadequate foreground dish of eggs i least conclusive painting of the show, , up as a reminder of that childhood lacko! ability. It lends authenticity to the defensive style, the over-compensation of individuali- ty, which makes Freud a primitive, even vt si°narY, painter for all his refinement (a Moralist too in his pitiless view of the Flesh), while, in this exhibition, stylistically aligning himself between Spenser and Bacon as unguardedly as he has ever done.
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