Some cultures believe that when a person’s photograph is
taken, their soul is stolen. Well beyond the advent of the camera,
British painter Lucian Freud’s portrait painting simply
borrows his subjects’ souls, mixing them with his own, and
subsequently transforming their minds and bodies into art that
lives on its own.
A retrospective of Freud’s realist portraits, featuring
over one hundred of his oil paintings (as well as watercolors,
etchings and charcoal, pen and ink drawings), is now on exhibition
at the Museum of Contemporary Art at California Plaza through May
25, in its only North American appearance.
Lucian, the grandson of Sigmund Freud, has been painting for
more than 60 years. These portraits, mainly of his friends, family
and acquaintances, offer both a look at how he has developed
artistically in that time, as well as serving as an
autobiographical sketch of the artist. This duality is possible
because of Freud’s fusion of his own emotional perceptions
into the depictions of his subjects.
What sets Freud apart as a realist painter is not that his
paintings provide an exact physical resemblance to their respective
subject. His subjects’ features and flaws are exaggerated
““ overly asymmetrical faces, enlarged eyes, cavernous lines
of shadow. But that highly-wrought intricacy creates a more
emotional, if not psychological, portrayal, revealing an inner life
that makes them whole. It is in this way that they gain their own
lives.
“My idea of portraiture came from dissatisfaction with
portraits that resemble people,” reads a quote from Freud
displayed in the exhibition. “I wish my portraits to be of
people, not like them. Not having the look of the sitter ““
being them.”
Famous for the long hours he demands of his sitters (usually
making them sit around the clock for 24 hours), Freud uses this
time not only to capture the subject in meticulous detail, but to
allow his own reflection, his thoughts and feelings, to become a
part of that exactness.
This emergent pathos is one reason why critics have lauded him
as the greatest living realist. But others, including Freud
himself, shrug off such simple superlatives.
“I hate labels,” said William Feaver, the
exhibition’s curator. “Some people call him the
greatest living realist painter, or the greatest living British
realist, or the greatest living German-born British realist. I say
“˜F-off’ to all that ““ he’s a
painter.”
As a direct descendent of the father of modern psychology,
critics and viewers alike love to project psychoanalytic methods
onto Freud’s artistry. And when looking at the array of
tormented faces, downcast eyes and exposed bodies crooked into
fetal position, you’d think you had stumbled upon the varied
patients of a mental institution. But Feazer says that Freud never
had an adult relationship with his grandfather, and the psychology
the viewers glean is probably due to their own association with his
name, and not characteristic of the painter.
Yet even in Freud’s early works, a psychological anguish
seems overtly apparent. A painting like “Evacuee Boy,”
for instance, shows a blond child, bug-eyed, the size of his head
equal to his torso, his left shoulder misshapen, almost Igor-like.
The painting’s disproportion helps evoke an internal
suffering, the large eyes like spotlights of abandon and terror,
sensations heightened by the background of black and red, like
flames in his dark psyche.
Here, Freud allows the painting’s emotion, both that of
the subject and the artist’s own reaction to that subject, to
overtake the portrait’s realism.
Those paintings, from the 1960s and onward, present
Freud’s mature style and vision. In these works, faces and
bodies are proportionate, limbs react to weight, a muscle flexes if
captured in movement.
“In the paintings from the ’60s there is an
emotional takeoff, no longer is Freud trying to find a way of
showing something, but he is actually showing it,” Feazer
said.
This artistic realization continues in Freud’s present
work. The exhibit’s last painting, “Self-Portrait,
Reflection” (2002) shows the 80-year-old Freud, dressed in a
gray suit, his white hair disheveled. Surrounding his head is an
explosion of swirls in a dark cloud. Like Goya’s “The
Sleep of Reason,” the inner life is painfully present in the
outside world. The power of Freud’s painting is his ability
to dissect the interior of his subject and himself, through the
physical form alone.
“Lucian Freud” will be at MOCA through May 25 at 250
S. Grand Ave., downtown Los Angeles. Call (213) 621-2766 or visit
www.MOCA-LA.org for more info.