Lucian Freud's grandfather chose the mind as his playground but the artist's obsession is with the human body in all its messy and fleshy peculiarity. Art Critic Aidan Dunne visits a major retrospective of the artist's work at the Tate Britain.
The painter, Lucian Freud, is a sphinx with many secrets. At any rate, he has certainly lived his life that way, not so much guarding his privacy as cultivating an air of mystery tinged with paranoia. Painting long hours, day and night, behind the double doors - one steel - of his sparsely appointed Holland Park studio in London, he is at the heart of a network of intense loves, loyalties, antagonisms and estrangements. One curator said dealing with him was a bit like finding yourself in the middle of a John le Carré novel. One of his sitters remarked that his insistence on secrecy had come to seem a bit sinister, as though they shared a guilty secret.
Not for nothing did Francis Bacon, setting out to paint his portrait, use a photograph of Kafka as a reference.
Caroline Blackwood, who was married to him in the 1950s, later wrote a story in which the widow of a celebrated painter is quizzed by a journalist. "I think it was always a relief to him," the widow reflects on their relationship, "to have someone with whom he felt he could share his guilt." There was always so much distrust, she recalls, perhaps it was fear, fear of exposure that kept him close to her: "It was as though I knew too much." But what is the source of the painter's guilt? "The fact that, at its best, his work was so deeply second-rate . . ."
As a retrospective of Freud's work opens at Tate Britain, his star has never been higher. Apart from the accolade bestowed on him by no less than critic Robert Hughes - that he is the world's greatest living realist painter - there is his enormous financial success over the last 20 years or so, not least since he has been represented by William Acquavella in New York at the start of the 1990s.
Of course, he had been, by any standard, commercially successful prior to that, but he has moved into a different league. Rather late in life you may think, for such a famous name, but he has never been prolific and a great deal of his work, while widely admired, has proved resistant to buyers.
Specifically, it is Freud's apparently obsessive interest in painting the human body in all its messy, fleshy peculiarity, its knobbly, bony awkwardness, and his forensic itemisation of its welts, bulges and blemishes, not to mention its graphically exposed genitalia, that presumably gives pause to potential purchasers - with a relatively small number of important exceptions.
Most important of all, perhaps surprisingly, is Charles Saatchi, the advertising mogul and collector more generally associated with the rise of Damien Hirst and the rest of the Brit Art pack. Next to the neo- conceptualism of cutting-edge Brit Art, the kind of painting Freud does should be seen as, at best, an anomaly, more likely an anachronism. But Saatchi's tastes have always been personal and cut across artistic orthodoxies with impunity.
In any context, Freud's work is an anomaly. You get a vivid sense of that if you take an attentive walk around the Tate retrospective. To an almost shocking extent, his world is concentrated into the spartan domain of the bare studio, something only underlined by his occasional glance at the view outside the window.
By the time you reach the last of the show's nine rooms, you are likely to feel a bit claustrophobic. You are also likely to feel you have seen too much painted flesh, too many faces and hands and elbows and feet and breasts, too many odd, angular contortions and probably too much paint itself, paint tortured and harassed into thick, distressed masses. Chances are, though, you will also have seen more than enough work so brilliant and startling it eclipses all doubts.
Apart from relatively few commissioned portraits, the individuals in his paintings serve to form an account of his emotional and sexual life in that they are usually friends, lovers and children. Kitty Garman, his first wife and the mother of Annie and Annabel, is there, as are they. So are Bernardine Coverly, the mother of Bella and Esther, and Suzy Boyt, mother of Rose, Ib, Ali and Susie. Lady Jane Willoughby, Jacquette Eliot, Belinda, Lady Lambton, Penelope Cuthbertson, India Jane Birley, Sophie de Stempel, Susanna Chancellor and, over the last 18 months or so, the writer Emily Bearn (who is said to be romantically involved with the painter) all are or were regular sitters. He has also painted Jerry Hall and, recently, Kate Moss.
Freud is a grandson of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. He was born in Berlin at the end of 1922, the second of three sons of Ernst Freud, who was an architect, and his wife, Lucie Brasch. By all accounts, Lucian got on well with his famous grandfather but, that said, throughout his life he has, to a large extent, walled himself off from his family. He caused a major row by declining to go to Sigmund's funeral in 1939. As far as is known, he and his younger brother, Sir Clement Freud, do not even speak to one another. Perhaps Freud acted out of an instinct for self-preservation: being perpetually labelled as Freud's grandson or Clement's brother might have scuppered any chance of his establishing an independent artistic identity for himself.
The family moved to England in 1932, as émigrés not refugees, and, in a slightly unorthodox fashion, became naturalised British citizens in 1939 - just in time, in both cases, the first to escape the Nazis, the second to prevent their being interned as enemy aliens. Freud had been through two schools by 1939, and he survived only a term at the Central School of Art before moving to the more sympathetic, indeed positively eccentric, East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing run by Cedric Morris.
A brief, unpleasant stint as an Ordinary Seaman on an Atlantic convey in 1941 convinced him a life of maritime adventure was not for him and back home, after a tonsillectomy, he gravitated towards bohemian London. There, Francis Bacon became one of the most important influences on him. They were introduced by Graham Sutherland before the end of the war, and became good friends.
Bacon is credited with prompting, perhaps, Freud's most important single change of technique as a painter when, in the late 1950s, he shifted from sable to hog-hair. That is, from making minutely detailed, smooth-surfaced images with fine sable brushes he switched to coarser hog-hair brushes and bolder, broadly-brushed images. It seems fair to say, despite producing paintings and drawings of dazzling virtuosity decade after decade, Freud does not, and never did have, any great facility as a painter or draughtsman.
He has expressed impatience with descriptions of his early work as adopting a naive or primitive approach. He maintains he just didn't know how to do it properly. When he radically changed his way of working, it took him quite a while to settle, despite some sporadic successes until, perhaps, the mid-1960s, when he produced a superb series of paintings of Penelope Cuthbertson. The candour and technical confidence of these works are typical of the mature Freud.
He and Bacon eventually fell out, but that probably isn't why he says the most important lesson Bacon taught him was not how to paint but how to live: that is, on the edge, with a disregard for bourgeois conventions. Temperamentally, he simply could not paint like Bacon anyway, and when he imported elements of Bacon's style - and he did try - the results were unconvincing. Something else coincided with the transition from "early" to "mature" Freud, however, which is that Caroline Blackwood left him.
She was his second wife. The first, Kitty Garman, whom he married in 1948, had been the subject of some of his earliest, fully accomplished pictures in which he records, with rapt fascination, every detail of her face. Just a few years later he met Blackwood, who was wild and exceptionally beautiful.
His paintings of her are extraordinary: obsessive, intense, lyrical and radiant with love. Yet the relationship was, by all accounts, stormy. There is a real sense of perplexity in Hotel Bedroom (1954) in which the shadowy figure of the painter regards a pensive Blackwood as she lies in bed.
While the paintings of Cuthbertson and many subsequent works really are superb, there is a sense of a new toughness to Freud's gaze after Blackwood. There is, what she herself termed, a gynaecological precision to his descriptions of his subjects, not only because they are undressed and exposed, but because the temperature of the pictures is distinctly cooler.
This is not to say he doesn't like his sitters or that he is a misogynist, but there is a cold intrusiveness to his method.
Why then do people pose for him? Because he is a famous artist, a great painter, a charming person, and perhaps because they think that, like his grandfather, he will tell them something about themselves that they do not know.
Not uniquely, the American philosopher and critic, Arthur Danto, confessed to ambivalent feelings about Freud's "naked portraits", writing that, after leaving an exhibition of his work, he felt he had been party to something slightly unsavoury and intrusive. Yet, he also felt the work was powerful, partly because Freud paints the human body as almost no-one else has done (though there are precedents, including Degas and Stanley Spencer), citing the way he depicts a subject's scrotum with a beady lack of idealisation and a disregard for decorum that is unusual in representational art, relishing fleshly disparities of colour and texture. This is the way bodies are, Danto concludes, and somehow Freud's paintings transcend their own limitations, particularly in the case of the heroic presence of Leigh Bowery, the flamboyant club star who died in 1994, and is the subject of a remarkable series of paintings. Bowery's successor as model, the equally physically formidable Sue Tilley, has also prompted outstanding pictures.
Yet bodies both are and are not like that. In effect, Freud does dramatise the flesh, enhancing colour and contrasts, not because he departs from the literal truth but because of his piecemeal examination of his sitters. We do not usually see things in the particular way his pictures often compel us to.
He is on record as remembering he hated being watched as a child, when he was, perhaps, excessively supervised. He has said, with some force, that his mother's extreme solicitousness towards him irritated him. It is immediately striking that someone who so resented being the subject of the another's gaze turned out to be someone who spends most of his life charming, persuading and pressurising others to be the objects of his gaze.
SURELY what he most likes and enjoys is looking, and while he looks, he paints. There is an erotic energy to his looking that is related to but not dependent on the object of his gaze. Certainly a great deal of the time he paints naked people, and people he loves who are sometimes naked, but, in fact, whatever he is looking at tends to be eroticised. The same level of even, patient fascination is evident in his stunning paintings of plants, and of the view from the window of his studio, as is there in the most psychologically charged figure study. And he can catch himself unawares, making wonderful portraits even when there is a distinct feeling he is not altogether engaged with the subject.
In the recent work there are some worrying signs he has started to believe his own publicity. Always happiest with a single, centrally positioned subject, he struggles, not always fruitfully, with group compositions. The paint surface can become clogged and curdled to the point of incoherence.
Yet, it would be rash to write him off. It's just as likely that we have yet to catch up with his current way of looking at things.
Lucian Freud is at Tate Britain, London, until September 22nd. The exhibition will travel on to Barcelona and Los Angeles. See www.tate.org.uk