Lucian Freud: New Perspectives reveals a cruel man, but a transfixing painter This show – weird, penetrating, moody – marks the centenary of Freud's birth and sits his work alongside greats like Titian and Caravaggio ⭐⭐⭐⭐
is showing his plant paintings . Commercial galleries around town are getting in on the action with selling exhibitions timed to coincide.: a posthumous anointing, allowing the Berlin-born painter to stand alongside the greats of its collection. It has been given a spacious, reverential hang, no doubt anticipating swelling crowds coming to pay homage.
In places, all that empty space felt stark and grim. I became very aware of the washed out muddy sticky tones of Freud’s reduced colour palette, of the muck and missing plaster on the walls of his studio and the unyielding harshness of the metal bedframe that supported so many of his sitters. Misery veils many paintings, like the slick of tears on his painted lovers’ eyes. There is a metaphorical breeze whipping through the middle of this show, something icy licking around your ankles.
Freud came to London with his family in 1933, escaping the rise of National Socialism. He was, at times, a cruel man, born of a cruel century. I couldn’t help thinking of the artist, which details the asymmetry of their relationship – coercive control, power games and manipulation that stretched across a substantial age gap – Paul was a young student, and Freud a visiting lecturer when their relationship started.
a lanky European aristocrat in a suit the colour of slowly braised liver sits in a balding velvet armchair with gilt limbs – a thrift-store throne – next to a pile of Freud’s filthy painting rags. His long hands splay awkwardly over his thighs like the extending wings of a plucked chicken, or a pair of electrocuted octopuses. There’s nothing aggrandising about this painting – Freud doesn’t make him look rich or noble or handsome.
There is an energy to these be-suited and uniformed men that is quite apart from Freud’s paintings of women and children. He’s meeting them at an equal level. It is interesting in this light that one of the least successful works here is Freud’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. It’s a small painting, fleshy and simian, but Freud doesn’t seem sure how to handle this power dynamic – he won’t glorify her, yet also can’t bring himself to make her squirm for him.
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