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)

Watch the whole programme - 21 June 2002

MARK LAWSON:
Natasha, Sigmund Freud was famous for explaining everything. Lucian never explains anything whatsoever. But this exhibition helps us to understand what he is doing?

NATASHA WALTER:
Yes, I think so. What makes him such a great painter is that his gaze is so relentless. That's what makes him so extraordinary. In these paintings, really, you have to lose yourself in the paintings, just gazing into this relentless gaze that he has.

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:
What really struck me is the austerity of his palette. I felt that I had an idea of what it was like to grow up in this country or anywhere in the 40s and 50s. It's the sort of drab greys, the browns, everything is there. I felt that that is where he matured as an artist in that time of austerity.

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:
I have a completely different experience of this. To me, the exhibition was fantastically tactile. It's a celebration of the flesh. For me, he paints the flesh in the same way that a film maker like David Cronenberg would depict flesh as a growing, mutating form.

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:
But to see one of his paintings, if you see them alone, you feel that. If you see a room of them, it seemed almost as if his world is in a corner, in a sense. I felt almost he was doing the same thing all the time. They're magnificent, I'm not putting them down, but I was surprised at how small his work seemed to me, in a sense. Even the huge canvasses, it's like he is looking through a tiny microscope.

MARK LAWSON:
It's like meat on the table at a banquet. It's a meaty exhibition.

BONNIE GREER:
It is meaty on the surface, but looking at it in its entirety, you see that all he is doing is looking at the meat on the table.

NATASHA WALTER:
It's easy to say that about the meat, because of the way he lays flesh open and displays it. I think it's very telling in the exhibition, that drawing of his mother dead. When you look at that and then look at it in the catalogue, it's laid next to a picture of one of his daughters sleeping. Then you really see how he does get over the life, the breathing, warm quality. When I said that it made me feel uncomfortable and weighed down, I don't see that as necessarily a negative thing. I think that is kind of part of his greatness.

MARK LAWSON:
What I found really revealing, you have to be careful of genetic readings, was that virtually all his daughters turned out to be rather good novelists. He is a very novelistic painter, I thought, in that he is describing a face rather than reproducing it. I thought of John Updike's writing that way, that the paint is like adjectives.

NATASHA WALTER:
You can compare him to writers. For me, his early works reminded me of early Ian McEwan, this sense of menace in rooms, people who can't really see each other.

MARK LAWSON:
Particularly the hotel bedroom, which is the Company of Strangers.

NATASHA WALTER:
Yes, and the incredible technical detail that builds up, you don't really know how, this sense of menace.

BONNIE GREER:
I am not putting him down, he is a master, a great painter, but the other feeling I had when I left was, "Who is coming after this man? Who is painting?" We now have people making art out of unmade beds and sharks. But who is actually confronting what this man is doing, which is quite heroic, which is paint and canvas.

MARK LAWSON:
We've talked a lot about the reactions to them. There are other issues that are raised. For example, Bonnie, obviously the relationship between a painter and a model is always quite an important thing. If they are nude women, women with whom he has had relationships of various kinds, then that troubles some people, his depiction of women.

BONNIE GREER:
I suppose what I meant when I said that he seemed small to me is that it seems in a way that Freud is painting with his back to the world. He is so intent on looking at what he is looking at that actually his back is to me, the spectator. I

MARK LAWSON:
We've had that discussion. The depiction of women, Natasha, and particularly the painting of female genitals is a question.

NATASHA WALTER:
I know that people see him being very aggressive towards women, focusing very much on their genitals. But I think that isn't fair. He does sometimes focus on genitals in the pictures, which can seem quite shocking, but you could almost just as well say he's got a thing about feet.

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:
Unlike a film maker such as Larry Clark, he includes himself. There is an extraordinary image of himself standing naked. He does it to himself as well.

MARK KERMODE:
Yes. Also this issue about concentrating aggression towards female bodies, the genitalia that he does with the most exuberance is the male genitalia. Those male nudes are staggering, largely because that area of the body has not been painted in that way before, in that very physical way.

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:
Also, we should say the range of it, besides very struck by the pictures of his mother, which I hadn't expected, alive and then dead. One unusual aspect of this exhibition, Bonnie, they give you almost no help, and occasionally at the edge of walls there are titles.

BONNIE GREER:
He did that himself.

MARK LAWSON:
I miscalculated at one point, and became convinced that he had painted his mother naked, and that in fact I'd counted three across instead of four! But is very little information. Is that the correct decision?

BONNIE GREER:
Yes, because he doesn't want you to read. This is paint, and he wants you to come in and look. If you can look at it and take it, fine. I thought that was fantastic, because you walk around thinking, "What is this thing?".

MARK KERMODE:
One of the great things about the exhibition is the way you can see his technique develop, the painterliness of it, the qualities of it developing.