Taking Off With Lucian Freud

On a recent flight returning from Denmark, an amusing incident led me to start asking people for their opinions on the painter Lucian Freud.  "Give me the first word that springs to mind when you think of Lucian?", I've been saying.  And the reactions were largely unsurprising.  'Lothario', 'fleshy', 'unflinching', the wonderful but subjective 'lubricious', the wry 'grandson', and the straightforward 'Realist'.  All this came about, though, because of a quite unsolicited reaction.  

Sitting on the runway, waiting to take off after a recent visit to Copenhagen, I opened up the book that I had been reading - Martin Gayford's Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud - and I began to read the following page.

Seatbelts fastened

Before I had even reached the end of my sentence, the woman sitting to my right remarked: "I really don't want to be looking at photographs like that when I'm stuck on an aeroplane!"  As is usual in these circumstances, and particularly when caught off-guard, it was a case of that wonderful French term L'esprit de l'escalier, conjuring up the perfect reply to someone else's observation or argument, only when you had left the room and were at the foot of the staircase.  I could have asked the lady, who I am certain was Danish, did she have any objection to the nakedness of The Little Mermaid, sitting bold as brass in Copenhagen harbour; or, in the spirit of debate, was it that Freud's Naked Portrait (2004) wasn't what some people might regard as a conventional beauty?  Or might she only be willing to appreciate the Rubenesque in an actual Rubens?  But no.  I paused, felt uncomfortable - I had a cold developing and I was sitting in the cramped window seat of a Ryan Air flight - and muttered, somewhat prosaically, "It's not a photograph, it's a painting."

I adore the paintings of Lucian Freud, but have also found myself intrigued by the negative reactions that they provoke, ranging from bemused titillation to outright, often visceral disgust.  Convention, usually coming in the sanctimonious guise of the Daily Mail, might have suggested that Freud flatter the Queen when he painted her portrait in 2001; instead the artist had other ideas (or perhaps he just kept to the ideas that had earned him the commission in the first place).  She looks 'fed up and grumpy,’ declared the Mail; and another newspaper branded the portrait a 'travesty' and that it made her look like she was sporting a 'six o'clock shadow'.

Queen Elizabeth II (2001)

Personally, I don't think it’s one of his best, probably because he did not have the time to do the subject justice.  Freud's subjects, including Martin Gayford, would often have to sit for over a hundred hours before a painting was finished.  The Queen clearly had other things to attend to.  And much more interestingly, convention might also have said that Sue Tilley wasn’t the right shape for a sprawling nude, asleep on a sofa.  Convention is wrong.  It's a dazzling portrait, fierce and daring, unashamed and, no matter what many people will tell you, a celebration of the human form.

Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) 

As for Gayford's book, it is quietly mesmerising.  The insights into painting are rich, particularly Freud's unique method of starting in the middle and building outwards, completing each detail whole before moving onto the next.  But it is through the seemingly extraneous that the book comes to life.  Some accounts hold that Freud was not a very nice man: at best amoral, at worst cruel and sadistic.  But you would not get a sense of that here.  He is charming, engaging and thoughtful.  He is also wonderfully indiscrete, particularly when he invites Gayford to supper after each sitting.  Over oysters at the Wolseley, Freud gossips about gangsters and royalty, providing the Venn between such disparate circles.  That he insists on dining with his sitters is not incidental.  He is fascinating on the links between art and the everyday lives of his models.  Over moules et frites, Freud remarks, "After a sitting I like to join as far as possible in the feelings and emotions of my models.  In a way, I don't want the picture to come from me, I want it to come from them.”  Gayford picks up the baton of the everyday and takes the book off on a wonderful tangent about art and food. 

"There is a complicated relationship between painting, cooking and eating.  Quite often the subject matter of painting is food, or as we call it in English, 'still life'.  The French term, nature morte, or 'dead life', describes it with bleaker honesty.  The eatable is, generally speaking, dead matter, animal and vegetable, which if not consumed will soon decay."  

We learn that Rembrandt used a mixture of oil and egg yolk in the pigments that he used to thicken his foreheads and nose bulges. As Gayford observes, Rembrandt was basically painting with a variety of mayonnaise.  Now to my mind, fussy as it is with food and the body, that actually is the kind of grossness that many of Freud's nudes provoke in others.

Rembrandt - Detail from Self-portrait (1659)

It's also worth reading for Freud’s controversial and blunt opinions on other artists.  Leonardo can't paint. Raphael is lightweight.  The people in Vermeer's works are insubstantial.  But he adores Titian.  Who am I to argue with any of this?  Lucian Freud is a modern master, and responsible for some of the greatest paintings, not just of the last century, but of all time.  At his best he is, indeed, up there with Rembrandt as a portraitist.  

My own favourite Freud would have to be Ib and her Husband (1992), a gloriously warm portrait of his daughter Isobel and her partner.  The strange, almost Caravaggesque composition, the Pollack like smatterings on the wall, the almost incidental appearance of that mid-twentieth century radiator.  Yes, the bed and scratchy looking blanket have the appearance of something that you might find in a Wormwood Scrubs cell, but this almost serves as a challenge to the huddled couple, an invitation to transcend their environment.  They do! And how many other paintings can you name that feature spooning?   

Ib and her Husband (1992)

Lucian Freud is certainly provocative.  If he wasn't, he simply wouldn't be Lucian Freud.  Maybe, then, it's not as straightforward as I would like to believe.  In fact, one of the words that was offered up to describe Freud, and that I noted at the beginning of this piece was 'Realist'.  I described that reaction as 'straightforward'.  But he wasn't a 'Realist'; he was, if you are forced to attach a label, an 'Expressionist'.  Perhaps we think of him as a Realist because he's unflinching.  Or when we reach for the term 'Realism' it comes from a place of pessimism, or a cynicism borne from gazing back at our own saggy mortality.  This artist will not flatter you so he's clearly being realistic.  But that leads you down a road that means you are describing these paintings, or at least many of them, as grotesques.  And that certainly, for me, won't do.  These are works of incredible beauty.  Not the idealised beauty of, say, a portrait by Raphael, but a modern, everyday beauty.  A lot of people certainly won't agree.  But they will, more often than not, react.  And that, finally, may matter more than anything.  

Of course, one of the questions that arises from a book like this, is would you have sat for a Freud portrait? Indeed, after reading Gayford's book, the arguments for and against become even trickier.  The sheer amount of hours that you would need to spend in his studio, settled in the same pose, wearing the same clothes, are something that I'd never really contemplated.  One waitress that served him in the Wolseley and who was subsequently invited to pose, threw in the towel after a few sittings, underestimating the stamina and sacrifice of time that were required.  And then, how willing would you have been to risk your vanity in the face of such an uncompromising artist?  Would it depend on you keeping your clothes on?  In the end I think I'd nervously declare myself a 'yes'.  Think of the company and the glorious anecdotes.  Think of the lovely food after each sitting.  Think of the result.  And finally, think of that Danish woman’s reaction on my flight if I’d turned the page onto my very own Lucian Freud portrait. 

Postscript: All this talk of food, and in particular, of the Wolseley, meant that it was the choice of restaurant for my birthday lunch.  I didn't go for the moules et frites, but was struck instead by an ice cream that was going by the name of 'The Lucian'.  A quick read of the flavours - pistachio, hazelnut and almond nougatine, with whipped cream and butterscotch sauce - suggested the kind of colours that you'd find in one of the painter's nudes.  "Was it named after the artist?" I enquired of our waiter.  It was.  Apparently it was his favourite way to end supper, always dining at table 35, tucked discretely away in the corner.  So not so much inspired by Lucian Freud, but rather appealing to the artist because of the colours, ones that dominate his later nudes.  Indeed, another tasty layer to Gayford's musings on the links between art and food.  What do you think?  

The Lucian