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Thursday, 27 June, 2002, 09:03 GMT 10:03 UK
Lucien Freud retrospective
Lucien Freud
Lucien Freud retrospective at Tate Modern - 60 years of work by Britain's best-known portrait painter. (Edited highlights of the panel's review)
MARK LAWSON:
NATASHA WALTER: Although it can be so wonderful to lose yourself in this world, it also is sometimes a very uncomfortable experience. I did feel as I left the exhibition, in a way, kind of weighed down by his vision. It's so relentless, and the weight of the flesh, the kind of the mortality of the flesh, sometimes the claustrophobia of his vision, and the way he reduces everything to the physical. Although it's a wonderful vision in its uniqueness, he can be an uncomfortable painter to spend a lot of time with.
BONNIE GREER: I also thought, at the same time, that what struck me are his self-portraits, his images of himself as he goes through the ages. How, as Natasha said, that gaze that never wavers. It looks at everything. The limiting part of that for me is that that gaze is so interior that you are not actually invited in. A great painter, someone like Rembrandt, it seems to me their paintings come out of the frame, and Freud's doesn't. I was quite surprised at that. They seem to be on that wall, they are what they are. And they don't quite go beyond that frame.
MARK KERMODE: All the way through it, you get this sense of the eruption of the body, but not in a bad, negative or decaying way, but in this kind of fantastic, outgrowing, spiritual way. There's the picture of the benefit supervisor in all her enormous, flamboyant glory, with flesh everywhere. Also, there is this sense that the flesh of the people he is looking at is almost bursting open. There is an early picture of a boy evacuee, in which it looks like the hair on his stomach is almost like a fire that is burning up into him. Then later, we have a character with a scar across his face, and it looks like his head is about to split open. Then we get to the portraits of Leigh Bowery, who everyone always knew from having that mask put on and wearing costumes. Now stripped bare, stripped naked, in all his fantastic fleshy majesty. I really didn't get the grimness, austerity or grimness. I got tactility.
BONNIE GREER:
MARK LAWSON:
BONNIE GREER:
NATASHA WALTER:
MARK LAWSON:
NATASHA WALTER:
MARK LAWSON:
NATASHA WALTER:
BONNIE GREER:
MARK LAWSON:
BONNIE GREER:
MARK LAWSON:
NATASHA WALTER: There are other paintings where the feet become this incredible focus. There's that beautiful picture of a woman sleeping on a bed in a blue dressing gown, her back to you, and you just see the soles of her feet turned to you. It's like all of humanity is in her feet, they seem vulnerable and hard at the same time.
MARK LAWSON:
MARK KERMODE: I thought there was nothing leery about the tone of it, or seeing it, feeling it and experiencing it for what it was, in all its fleshiness. You are right, the feet, the noses, sometimes the paintings look like that model of the man¿ The more feeling you have in the end of your fingers, the bigger your fingertips are.
MARK LAWSON:
BONNIE GREER:
MARK LAWSON:
BONNIE GREER:
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See also:
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05 Apr 02 | Panel
02 May 02 | Panel
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