Lucian Freud: The Unblinking Eye - The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/04/magazine/lucian-freud-the-unblink...

December 4, 1988

Lucian Freud: The Unblinking Eye

By Marina Warner: Marina Warner has written about art for The Independent and the Times Literary Supplement of London. Her novel,
''The Lost Father,'' will be published in the spring.

LUCIAN FREUD HAS BECOME a figure of popular myth, an artist poised between the underworld and the aristocracy, a
kind of slumming Faust who prowls lowlife pubs and eats woodcock for breakfast.

He is wrapped in secrecy, gives his telephone number to no one, has no nameplate or number on his front door.

In Britain, Lucian Freud's name appears on any connoisseur's list of the country's greatest 20th-century artists, along with
Stanley Spencer and Henry Moore and Francis Bacon; abroad, he is only selectively admired. A critic for Le Monde,
reviewing a Freud exhibition at the Pompidou Center last year, described him as painting flesh like badly carved ham.
Other reviewers derided his conscious emulation of Old Masters, his occasional use of easel portraiture and gilt frames.

Critics in America have been more effusive. In the opinion of Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time, Lucian Freud is simply
''the greatest living realist painter.'' John Russell, the chief art critic for The New York Times, went even further: Freud is
''the only living realist painter,'' he suggested, reviewing a show at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington last year. ''As a
witness to human nature in the second half of our century he has no equal, whether in Britain or elsewhere.''

There remains, beneath the surface of all such statements, the feeling of pleading a cause. Freud's work is easy to admire,
difficult to like. But then so are many great paintings. Freud used to admire openly the work of Francis Bacon, a
once-close friend, and he owns one of Bacon's key works, the embracing couple inspired by Eadweard Muybridge's
wrestlers. Other equally uncompromising English painters, like Edward Burra, may have shaped the younger Freud's vision
with their disaffected embrace of lowlife; Stanley Spencer's hawk-eyed nude portraits of himself and his wife offer another
obvious comparison (one which Freud himself rejects). Freud has been connected to the ''School of London,'' the group of
painters that includes R. B. Kitaj, Michael Andrews, Francis Bacon, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, though none of
these artists have much in common except their allegiance to figuration and a palette that tends to the murky.

This kind of painting is in great demand of late. After years of discreet dedication, Frank Auerbach recently represented
England at the Venice Biennale, and the prices of these artists have soared. A Lucian Freud rarely comes on the market,
and the list of hungry patrons is long. But recently, two small oils, neither very special, were auctioned. A portrait from
1966 fetched $470,000; a more recent painting, ''Seated Figure,'' brought $385,000.

Most of Freud's work is in private collections or in the hands of his dealer, James Kirkman. In the unlikely event that a
major painting of Freud's were to reach the salerooms, who knows what it would fetch? At least his work can now be seen
in the United States. Next Saturday, a show entitled ''Lucian Freud: Works on Paper,'' will open in San Francisco before
moving to Minneapolis, New York and Cleveland.

FREUD INVOKES THE INFLU-ence of past masters - Titian, Rembrandt, Ingres, Constable, Renoir, Degas - and he
returns to the National Gallery in London for inspiration rather than to the contemporary venues of Cork Street in Mayfair.
Many critics place him in direct line of succession to the Berlin artists of his youth, Otto Dix and Christian Shad of the
Neue Sachlichkeit - the ''New Objectivity.''

Freud disavows any knowledge of their work, but he shares with the Berliners a harshness of tone, an apparent
misanthropy that thrives on the frank contemplation of human sexuality. His imagery is even more unpalatable than theirs:
The terms he sets make consent to them reluctant, even painful. The artist himself once put the question, ''What do I ask of
a painting?'' and answered, ''I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.''

Freud often manages to astonish, he rarely fails to disturb, at his best he can convince. (''When Lucian paints a sink,'' says
his former wife, the Irish writer Caroline Blackwood, ''you have never seen a sink look so sinkish.'') Seduction is the weak
link: This painter often convinces us of the trust between himself and his sitters; but the more he reveals that trust, the
more he betrays it, and the spell of seduction is broken.

At the same time, Freud attracts excited panegyrics, and enjoys the deep loyalty of many friends. ''He's the most exciting
man I've ever met.'' ''He's a man of integrity, a genius'' - you hear this all the time. ''I like him immensely,'' says the painter
and art historian Lawrence Gowing. ''I find him a singular experience. I think we admire one another and I feel very proud

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to be his friend. Most people are aware that he's one of the most exceptional people they've ever met.'

Freud's eyes provoke especially awestruck responses: ''The whites go all the way around.'' ''He's mesmerizing.'' His
glittering gaze, under furrowed brows, wanders unblinkingly in search of an object that will hold its full attention. When it
does come to rest, it provokes disquiet, fear, the shivery pleasure of being looked at: ''I felt I was being observed, every bit
of me, that his eyes were malignant,'' testifies one of Freud's acquaintances. As if he were a modern Bluebeard, he gives a
glimpse of the forbidden chamber where the bodies of past subjects lie, and then forbids any further prying. Few people,
knowing his love of privacy, will allow themselves to be quoted by name.

In a recent BBC interview, Freud talked unassumingly of his work, in a hesitant voice with a guttural German ''r.'' ''Many
people are astonished,'' he said, ''that [ someone ] would sacrifice a possibility of comfort and what's thought to be an
agreeable life to a life of uncertainty - and loneliness perhaps.'' He pictured himself dedicated to a life of painting, solitary
in his studio like a monk who has forsworn the world. He will be 66 this month, and he bears the signs of his dedication:
thin and pale, with a birdlike crest of graying hair above a beaky face, he looks a little like a smaller Samuel Beckett. His
clothes have an Italian air: textured materials in muted colors, with a silk scarf loosely draped on top.

Through the muffling and the mystification, some aspects of his life emerge. Lucian Freud was named after his mother,
Lucie Brasch, known as Lux, and a favorite daughter-in-law of Martha Bernays, the wife of Sigmund Freud. His middle
name is Michael. His elder brother, Stephen, and his younger brother, Clement, were also given the names of angels -
Gabriel and Raphael - a biblical touch that must have raised a smile from their grandfather. Lucie was (Continued on Page
96) a grain merchant's daughter, as grave-looking in a youthful photograph as in the memorable and moving sequence of
portraits that Lucian has painted of her since the early 1970's, paintings in which for once the artist's fixed scrutiny is
returned on equal terms.

Lucie Brasch married Ernst Freud, the psychoanalyst's second son, in 1920. Lucian was born two years later, in Berlin,
where Ernst practiced as an architect. The family lived near the Tiergarten, a prosperous district of the city, and the
household welcomed some of the many inspired minds working in Germany before the establishment of the Third Reich. It
was at Ernst's house that Sigmund Freud met Albert Einstein.

The family's childhood holidays in the Alps and their comfortable upbringing among the cultivated bourgeoisie of Vienna
carried few warnings of the brutalities in store in Germany. Yet Ernst and his brother Martin had both fought in World War
I on the Russian front, and Martin describes, in his autobiography, how he fought duels to defend his honor against
anti-Semitism in the army.

In 1933, when Nazism came to power, Ernst moved his family to London, settling, like many other refugees, in
Hampstead, where he continued his practice as an architect. Summers, they went to the Suffolk countryside, to ''Hidden
House,'' a renovated thatched country cottage named after their lost holiday home on an island on the Hiddensee in
Germany. Sigmund Freud wrote to Ernst from Vienna in 1938: ''My best wishes for the opening of Hidden House! It is
typically Jewish not to renounce anything and to replace what has been lost. Moses. . .was the first to set an example. In
our present difficult times your existence in England stands out boldly against all the misery around us. Whenever I think
of your success I feel pleased and full of hope for the chances of the next generation.''

In June 1938, Ernst Freud went to Paris to meet his father and mother, who had at last been given release papers from
Austria. He brought them back to London, first to a flat overlooking Primrose Hill park, and then to the present Freud
Museum, the house in Maresfield Gardens, a few doors away from his own family's apartment.

The English greeted Sigmund Freud very warmly: He was delighted that taxi drivers recognized him. But in Austria, four of
his five sisters were taken away and died, most likely in Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. The background of Lucian Freud
contains the struggles and terrors of the century in a more concentrated form than most childhoods.

Lucian was the apple of his mother's eye; he was a blue-eyed boy, taking after her in his blue-gray gaze and slight build.
''He was totally alive,'' remembers the poet Stephen Spender. ''Like something not entirely human, a leprechaun, a
changeling child, or, if there is a male opposite, a witch.'' Spender lived with his family in the apartment above the Freuds.
He also remembers that when his wife, Natasha, once was ill in bed, Lucian left the family dinner downstairs to offer her a
single asparagus. Later, his mother appeared, asking if Lucian had been upstairs. ''Even when my children do something
good, they won't tell me about it,'' she said.

Lucian was sent to Dartington, an artistic and liberal boarding school in the Devon countryside, and when that failed to
contain him, to Bryanston, where he took to riding and not much else, not even art. At 16, he was back in London. He was
admitted to the Central School of Arts and Crafts on the strength of the only sculpture he has ever made, a rather
endearingly clumsy three-legged horse. He began drawing, figures and faces and occasionally rebarbative plants, in a
flattened, linear style of suspended animation. His drawings were admired and reproduced, along with the work of Graham
Sutherland and Henry Moore, in the literary journal Horizon, which had been founded by Spender and Cyril Connolly in
1939. The teen-age Lucian had the mark of genius upon him, people felt.

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After a year at the Central, he began to attend The East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting, in Dedham Vale
-Constable country. It was an unusual school, run as a private house, with no fixed fees, by the idiosyncratic painter and
botanist Sir Cedric Morris and Lett Haines, a gourmet and artist of disturbing wit. One night, after Lucian and another
student had been smoking, the school burned to the ground. They were forgiven, but not before Lucian had run away
briefly to sea; he returned to study with Morris when the school reassembled in another house.

Lucian Freud acknowledges Morris's influence on him. The Tate Gallery owns the portrait Morris painted of Freud in
1941, when he was 19, showing him with irrepressible curls, bee-sting carmine lips and eyes so blue the blue fills all the
area from lid to lid. He looks like some sci-fi blind angel. He was already aware - how could he not be? - that the
fascination he exerted over people endowed him with power. He may have learned by then that the boundaries of bad
behavior expand for those considered geniuses. Upper English Bohemia - especially the generation slightly older than
Freud's, the generation chronicled by Evelyn Waugh - was so languidly self-confident in those days that it was enchanted
by delinquency.

IN SPITE OF HIS ER-ratic schooling, Freud is a man of wide-ranging culture, visual and oral; he quotes easily from
memory passages of T.S. Eliot and the German literature of his youth. For a painter with a consummate touch, his
handwriting is extraordinarily clumsy - ''suggesting,'' in his own words, ''a child of 11 lacking in thyroid'' - and his spelling
may explain his shyness about committing himself to paper. He has written almost nothing about his art, (Continued on
Page 110) 5:19,7:43 ,10,82>and now abjures a statement he made in Encounter in 1954, that the ''intensification of reality''
at which he aims depends on how intensely the painter understands and feels for the person or object of his choice.

His spoken thoughts, on the other hand, inspire rhapsodies from friends and sitters: Lord Goodman, legal eminence grise in
English political life in the 70's, has written in The London Review of Books about his early-morning sessions with Lucian
Freud. The artist would arrive at 8:30 and draw the famous lawyer in his pajamas, propped up on pillows, entertaining him
the while. ''He is one of the most exciting human beings I know,'' wrote Lord Goodman afterward.

''There is not a day when some element of novelty does not emerge from his conversation, and I always see him depart
with regret.'' A model recalls Freud's eagerness to know everything about her -who she saw, what she was studying, what
her life was like in London. ''He likes to gossip,'' said a friend. ''Which is why he understands how people gossip about
him.''

During the war, Peter Watson, the philanthropist patron of Horizon, provided Freud and the painter John Craxton with
their first studio, in London's Paddington, an area Freud has appropriated as his own wasteland, the remorselessly
delineated unreal city of dereliction and solitude. He showed for the first time in mixed exhibitions at the Lefevre Gallery
in 1944 and 1946, while continuing to move through London's haute boheme on winged heels. Freud's large Ensorish early
painting, ''The Refugees,'' hung in Spender's Horizon office.

Watson was keen to dispel the claustrophobia and grimness of the wartime city in which these young artists had been
confined, and he paid for Craxton and Freud to visit Greece. Craxton was immediately captivated by the Aegean, and
eventually made his home in Crete; Freud has remained an indoor painter, a willing prisoner of the electric light that studio
portraiture in London imposes. For a man of his urbanity, he has traveled very little; besides the trip to Greece, he has
visited Colmar in Alsace to see the Grunewald altarpiece, and the Netherlands to look at the work of Frans Hals. He also
spent some time in Paris in the 50's.

Freud's first marriage was to Kitty Garman, the daughter of Jacob Epstein and the subject of some of his early haunted
portraits, painted in his meticulous and enameled ''Flemish'' style. They show her with huge, illuminated eyes, throttling a
kitten or an emblematic red rose. They had two daughters, Annie and Annabel, who have often posed for their father.

He then married Caroline Blackwood, who later became the wife of Robert Lowell. Caroline Blackwood also appears,
with wide-apart, translucent blue eyes, in some of Freud's most powerful pictures, like ''Hotel Bedroom,'' which mark a
transitional phase between his youthful miniaturist style, achieved with fine sable brushes, and the near expressionist
boldness of his breakthrough in the Marlborough show of the mid-60's. She has said that she is lying in bed dressed because
it was winter and it was cold, and Lucian had broken the window behind him in order to make room to paint.

THE NEED TO PAINT comes before all; renunciation again and again strikes a steely note in Freud's life. In the words of
James Kirkman, the artist's dealer, Freud ''isn't remotely interested in money, in what are commonly called worldly goods.''
Freud dislikes holding on to anything except his painting; he is said to discard suddenly, peremptorily, mistresses, friends,
people who have come to bore him or otherwise displease him; he never holds on to money, preferring to gamble it away
on horses. He used to go to the bookmakers, but the sums got to be so large it was embarrassing to bet in public (or so the
story goes). Freud does seem attached to his car, an old Bentley; it's said around London that he throws money loose into
the trunk and drives wildly.

He drives himself hard, too, sleeping rarely and giving ap pointments to models around the clock. Lord Goodman was
surprised to be visited before he rose; other models have kept vigil with the artist through the night. The ordeal of sitting

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for Freud brings to mind the prolonged retreats of Buddhist initiates: the art collector Baron Thyssen calculated that he sat
150 hours for one portrait.

The ''Night Portraits'' are illuminated by a powerful bulb, and the glare this emits, together with Freud's natural concern to
keep his naked subjects warm, means he sometimes strips to the waist to paint, as can be seen in some of the self-portraits.
But the heat also dilates the veins, and re-laxes the tissues and the pose of his models, resulting in the characteristic
ecorche appearance of his painted flesh. His scrutiny is so searching that he notices if a model has been exercising or not.
Once, when a model got cold in spite of his care, and had a bath to warm up, Freud could not continue painting her
because the color of her flesh had changed.

He has more than one studio, and given the painstakingness of his methods, more than one painting in process, so that
models are aware of other sitters' visits to the artist, of other poses. When he has no model, he turns to the large house
plants he grows, rendering every withered stalk and sere leaf with scrupulous attention, or to the heaps of painting rags in
the studio, which provide an equivalent to baroque draperies in the background of portraits - a pile appears to the side of
Baron Thyssen, for instance. The critic Lawrence Gowing says that Freud is the only artist he knows of, besides Cezanne,
who wipes his brush clean after every stroke. Surplus hotel linen is used for this purpose, bought in bulk from a specialist
shop - the sheetlessness of the models' bed is a matter of choice. One sitter commented that she liked the bare furnishings
around her, that she began to feel friendly toward the prickles and tears in the upholstery; it was naked, too, like her.

The portraits by Lucian Freud do not seek to create an illusion; the circumstances in which the sittings take place are never
neglected. Freud paints ''studio events,'' in a phrase of the art historian Svetlana Alpers, and his portraits - especially his
''Naked Portraits'' - dramatize relationships through the poses he contrives. His uncompromising dedication announces itself
theatrically in the studio's appearance - the scenery of ''La Boheme'' can seldom have looked more studiolike than this
setting, with its bare boards, burst sofa, slipless pillows and stripped mattresses, unpainted walls, cracked pipes and
industrial sinks that appear as subjects in their own right or as background to the figures, clothed and naked. Posed on a
studio couch, one naked young man holds a clothed older man by the foot, performing a scene of loving dependence.

Freud deals with male subjects, singly or in couples, in a more consistently tender manner than he does with women,
though he probes their fleshly appearance as deeply. Apart from the portraits of his mother, Freud's images of faces seen
close-up - paintings like ''Red-Haired Man'' or ''The Big Man'' - reveal his power at its most resonant and profound. The
anonymity of his subjects, even patrons like the Duke of Devonshire and other members of the Cavendish family, alters the
client-artist relationship and makes a statement about the painter's independence. This artist does not accept to paint
anyone; this artist does not need to flatter.

Like Matisse, Freud paints close enough to his models to be able to lean over and touch them; as he paints standing, such
proximity to models lying down means that he planes above them. One self-portrait in a mirror reveals this characteristic
angle from the point of view of a reclining nude: The artist, by looking down at his own reflection, has painted himself
looming above the picture plane in almost mannerist foreshortening. The lofty viewpoint of many of the ''Naked Portraits''
intensifies the atmosphere of domination when a woman on her own is in question.

Freud has perfected an almost sculptural technique, using bristly hog-hair brushes dipped in thickly leaded paint to produce
a rather stippled, crumbly surface, rather like the patina on old bronze; but his instantly recognizable style shouldn't
obscure the remarkable differences of physical individuality he conveys as he transcribes bodies. He has said about his use
of friends and lovers as subjects: ''I like to think they don't mind being there, and I quite like the idea of their posing for me
being a specific part of something they're doing for me.

'' [ Professional ] models would have some idea of posing in itself - which is ex-actly what I'm trying not to do. I want them
to be themselves. I don't want to use them for an idea I've got . . . . I actually want to do them. Even their identical twin
wouldn't do at all. . . .''

The succession of models can be recognized not only from their faces, but from the jut of their pelvic bone or the aureole
of their nipples. The intensity of Freud's attention involves his models deeply in the process of painting. One of them, Anne
Dunn, a painter herself, has said in an interview on BBC radio that it was ''mentally painful - because the sitter has to give
so much back to Lucian that the sitter in fact feels devoured and digested and regurgitated almost and it also, for myself
personally, gave me acute anxiety. . . . I didn't feel I had the strength to go on.''

Though people fear being painted by Freud, some have actively sought out a relationship with him in full knowledge of his
conditions. As one artist remarked, ''The models make those paintings with him.'' The pictures can suggest rivalry between
the models; they seem in their poses to be challenging a predecessor, surpassing her in boldness or in bleakness, in
sacrificial application to the task. Freud admires Rodin, who also depended on the constant presence of many live models
in the studio. He has a medium-sized bronze Balzac, the Rodin sculpture that equates creative genius and phallic energy, in
the hallway of his house.

Interestingly, Lucian Freud's paintings of the female nude respond directly to two challenges issued by feminist art

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criticism. He has ''a horror of the idyllic,'' he told the critic John Russell, and he refuses to prettify and idealize, to subsume
a particular body into a prior canon of desirability. He takes his cue from such erotic pictures as Courbet's ''L'Origine du
Monde,'' the famous image of a woman's spread thighs, and uses the pose itself to express states of being, from desolation
to voluptuous abandonment.

Lawrence Gowing says that Freud ''gives the impression of not having considered [ anything ] taboo at all,'' that ''he would
think it a very superficial thing to do, to feel compelled to defy a taboo.'' His paintings break taboos continually, either on
purpose or because the artist is in ignorance of them. By painting his daughters naked (they are almost the only models
who are named) and sometimes pregnant, he has wrought a variation on the Northern Renaissance theme of Lot and his
daughters, itself a fulfillment of Oedipal desire. In some of his most contemplative works to date, he has studied a woman
with whippets, lifting in a fascinating way the barrier between humans and animals, revealing a common capacity for
physical abandonment. But Freud's ''portraits'' of animals, like his portraits of people, continue to disturb, as he intends,
because in spite of all the care that has gone into making them, he never manages to communicate warmth. His gaze scans
outward appearance, all its observable particulars, hairs and bumps and pores, with great powers of discernment, like a
space camera taking pictures, out in the void. Lucian Freud said of his recent ''double portraits'' (studies of couples or
people with animals) that they are more difficult to paint ''because I'm outnumbered - and there's a certain combative
element, only in so far as you want them [ the models ] to sit as you wish, and just suggesting it and so on, and controlling
them - maybe just with movements of the head. It means twice as much control has to be exercised -like two circus
animals.''

PROHIBITION IS THE spring of drama. Like an animal trainer, Freud deals in prohibitions, invoking some and breaking
others. By transgressing against common feelings about intimacy and privacy, Lucian Freud has paradoxically managed to
restore to the naked body its character as the inalienable possession of an individual. He is a determinist who does not
reflect on good and evil in his art, because such reflection would be pointless. He wants his pictures to look ''inevitable''; he
talks of his powerlessness to do otherwise than he does:

''I felt I had much less freedom than I have now, and I haven't got that much now. . . . It's really to do with the idea . . . of
not having free will, thinking I'm doing something in a different way . . . and realizing that because of my given nature it's
very hard to do.''

When the artist himself opens the door to the forbidden chamber, the bodies he reveals there tell us more than we imagined
we would ever know about their owners; but they also tell us about ourselves. For an artist who rejects symbolism, Freud
nevertheless continues the Western tradition that places the human body - especially naked - at the center of its symbolic
language, and what it expresses in his art speaks to the times.

Born in Berlin, the grandson of Sigmund Freud, living as a man apart in a city he hardly ever leaves, at odds with his own
fortunes, working over in his art the attraction and repulsion of the flesh, Lucian Freud might have been invented by a
modern Musil or Proust: he is, both the man and the artist, a defining antihero of our own fin de siecle.

Photos of Lucian Freud (Jane Brown) (pg. 68); Lucian Freud artist work (Private Collection) (pg. 69-70 & 122); Freud
with mother, Lucie Brasch (David Montgomery/Sunday Times, London) (pg. 110);

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