It is always difficult to say anything new about an artist like Freud whose work has been written about in innumerable memoirs and hagiographies. Here goes anyway.
My main emotion was one of admiration for his sitters: Sue Tilley, the eponymous ‘Benefits Supervisor’, or Leigh Bowery – who both lie, sit, spreadeagle and sprawl in the most courageous nakedness – every roll of fat, flesh and genitalia exposed and relished in coruscating detail. I couldn’t do that. How do you get that sort of confidence?
He had, apparently, between fourteen and forty children. It’s the ‘between’ bit that gets me.
I found the progression in his work interesting. The 1940s are distinctive – a ‘naif’ style in green hues that is utterly different from anything from the mid-1950s onwards where the thick paint and sculptured flesh tones are instantly recognizable. In about the mid 1970s he started using Cremitz White, and there is again a change – less in style but more in the flesh tones which have a chalkiness and, to my eye, uglier hue.
This uglification I found difficult to understand. There was one tall picture with a girl - or is it a woman - sitting naked on the sill of a first floor window. The chalky patina makes her appear emaciated and her breasts are pendulous and sagging. There was a photograph of Freud painting this woman – and she is young and beautiful. He also painted The Duchess of Devonshire in her thirties, and she complained that he made her look sixty. You can see why. And yet the pictures of his mother are some of the most moving and sensitive to old age I have ever seen. Why did he always want to see flesh in its final iteration - even when that was not what was in front of him?
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