{"id":283917,"date":"2026-02-14T13:55:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-14T13:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/283917\/"},"modified":"2026-02-14T13:55:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-14T13:55:09","slug":"indelicate-confrontational-essential-the-national-portrait-gallerys-lucian-freud-show-is-a-marvel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/283917\/","title":{"rendered":"Indelicate, confrontational, essential \u2014 the National Portrait Gallery\u2019s Lucian Freud show is a marvel"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a young man, Lucian Freud disliked praise for his devastatingly candid, unsparing, forensic draughtsmanship: \u201cThe idea of doing painting where you\u2019re conscious of the drawing and not the paint just irritated me.\u201d <\/p>\n

But later, confidently the virtuoso of monumental, meaty paint-as-flesh figures, he changed his stance: \u201cBeing able to draw well is the hardest thing, far harder than painting, as one can easily see from the fact that there are so few great draughtsmen compared to the number of great painters \u2014 Ingres, Degas, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, just a few.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The marvellous, insightful Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting at London\u2019s National Portrait Gallery shows that he ranks alongside those rare masters, and created some of the 20th century\u2019s most distinctive portraits on paper.<\/p>\n

Across half a century and a diversity of media, his instinct for the essential, the indelicate and the confrontational give the exhibition riveting consistency<\/p>\n

\u201cFrancis Bacon\u201d (1951), shirt and trousers undone, flexes his hips, sexually aggressive in crayon and chalk. Dishevelled, craggy \u201cLord Goodman in his Yellow Pyjamas\u201d (1987) is \u201cunshaved and unwashed\u201d in a flamboyant etching dashed with buttercup yellow. Picasso\u2019s biographer \u201cJohn Richardson\u201d (1998), in charcoal and paint, said he was \u201cconfronted with the real me \u2014 apprehensive, not to say fearful \u2014 which I usually try to conceal under a mask of confidence and geniality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Richardson\u2019s small-scale depiction was a preparation for Freud\u2019s condensed \u201cQueen Elizabeth II\u201d (2000-01) \u2014 and here she is, tight-lipped, stoical: a weary old lady transformed into an extraordinary presence by her steely look and the weight of her glinting impasto-heavy diadem.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Freud generally portrayed the young with prophetic ruthlessness \u2014 both his tearful lover Celia Paul, 22, in \u201cHead of a Girl\u201d, and Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, painted in her late thirties for \u201cWoman in a White Shirt\u201d, look decades older. But he was also an outstanding, heartbreaking chronicler of actual old age, especially his widowed, depressed mother. In a sculptural charcoal drawing, with white highlights for wavy hair and broad brow, in an etching in knotty lines, frontal with a direct gaze, and in the defiantly absorbed \u201cThe Painter\u2019s Mother Reading\u201d (1975), she compels as a beleaguered woman clinging to her fierce intelligence and inner life.<\/p>\n

\"AAn incomplete etching titled \u2018Bella in her Pluto T-Shirt\u2019 (1995) \"A\u2018Bella in her Pluto T-Shirt\u2019 (1995) \u00a9 Lucian Freud Archive<\/p>\n

Across half a century and lively diversity of media \u2014 ink, chalk, pastel, crayon, etchings, plus three dozen carefully selected oils \u2014 Freud\u2019s instinct for the essential, the indelicate, the confrontational, his intensification of the real, give the exhibition riveting consistency and integrity. Meanwhile, a number of unfinished pieces and etchings in several states, such as \u201cBella in her Pluto T-shirt\u201d, bear witness to how, as his daughter Bella Freud recalls in the catalogue, when \u201cthings would go wrong\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009he never gave up, he never stopped\u201d.<\/p>\n

The show is original and full of rare things. Its impetus was 48 sketchbooks that the NPG received from Freud\u2019s estate in 2015-24, a stash beginning with charming childhood illustrated letters in the S\u00fctterlin script taught in 1920s German schools \u2014 \u201cgothic writing with so many loops that I could fill in with colour\u201d, Freud remembered. Of greatest interest are works on paper relating to major paintings, illuminating his thought process and the evolving role of drawing.<\/p>\n

In wartime Britain, the refugee from Berlin initially brought a mournful, crystalline exactitude redolent of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement \u2014 the wide-eyed \u201cBoy with a Pigeon\u201d, \u201cYoung Man\u201d in crayon and cont\u00e9\/chalk (both 1944)\u00a0\u2014 and the idiosyncratic detail of German graphic tradition, as in the figure towering over little streets and rooftops \u201cMan and Town\u201d (1941).\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"A\u2018Portrait of a Young Man\u2019 (1944) \u00a9 Lucian Freud Archive<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Ingres of existentialism,\u201d declared art critic Herbert Read when virtuosity shot Freud to fame in the late 1940s. Everyone in his early portraits looks terrified \u2014 from his first wife, Kitty Garman, buttoned into a bus conductor\u2019s uniform in \u201cGirl in a Dark Jacket (1947)\u201d, strands of hair standing up as if electrified, to the toy monkey spreadeagled, grinning miserably, who shares a cradle with a plump-cheeked baby in the cont\u00e9 sketch \u201cJuliet Moore Asleep\u201d (19443). Plants compete with people to destabilise near-surreal dramas: \u201cSelf-portrait with Hyacinth (1948)\u201d, \u201cGirl with a Fig Leaf (1947)\u201d.<\/p>\n

Pivotal to the story of Freud\u2019s development, a luminous early room contrasts portraits of his second wife, Guinness heiress Caroline Blackwood \u2014 inspiration for his beautiful \u201cGirl in Bed\u201d (1952) and its queasy successor \u201cHotel Bedroom\u201d (1954), where the couple seem disconnected and Freud himself is a menacing shadowy column \u2014\u00a0with \u201cWoman Smiling\u201d (1958-59), his first, larger-than-life-size, painterly portrait of his girlfriend, Suzy Boyt.<\/p>\n

The Caroline pictures are tightly linear, freckles and bitten fingernails picked out with a fine sable brush, similar to silverpoint drawing. Yet the enlarged shining blue eyes disconcertingly exceed realism: Freud\u2019s close-up concentration sometimes led, he said, to \u201cinvoluntary magnification\u201d. In childlike round handwriting encircling a sketch of the pair embracing, he addresses \u201cmy dearest Caroline, I am feeling heavy with sadness this morning I can hardly move. I miss you so much. I have quite forgotten what you are like.\u201d Presence, you sense, is everything.<\/p>\n

\"AFreud\u2019s 2002 portrait of David Hockney \u00a9 Lucian Freud Archive<\/p>\n

For \u201cWoman Smiling\u201d, Freud switched from sable brushes to coarser hog\u2019s hair bristles,\u00a0abandoning smooth flatness for full contours and gestural marks. Detail remains strong \u2014\u00a0mottled complexion, folding, puckering skin \u2014 while thick impasto gives a fleshy feel and new plasticity. Watercolour experiments around 1960, such as \u201cAma in Venice\u201d, Freud\u2019s daughter Annabel with flowing hair in warm orange-brown washes, filling a page in a Venetian sketchbook, further loosened his handling.<\/p>\n

Although from then onwards he drew less, a revelation is the numerous studies for his 1983 painting \u201cLarge Interior W11\u201d, featuring Boyt, her son Kai, Paul, and Bella in an outlandish reprise of Watteau\u2019s group \u201cPierrot Content\u201d, borrowed here from Madrid.\u00a0Turpentine and charcoal portraits \u2014 Boyt holding a leaflike fan in \u201cWoman with Geranium\u201d, Bella in scratchy brocade dress, strumming a mandolin \u2014 blur lines between painting and drawing;\u00a0Freud at that time began canvases with direct charcoal strokes pulled with turpentine-soaked rags.<\/p>\n

The show\u2019s largest painting, the majestic \u201cSleeping by the Lion Carpet\u201d (1996), displayed alongside huge drawings of model Sue Tilley, inaugurates the extravaganza of late Freud. The grandeur of Tilley\u2019s undulating flesh is matched by the predatory big cat on the hanging rug:\u00a0a complicity between human, animal, textile. \u201cLucian observes the individuality of every inanimate and animate object with the same level of concentration,\u201d says David Dawson, director of the Lucian Freud Archive.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Recommended<\/p>\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Displayed alongside the great portrait \u201cDavid Hockney\u201d (2002), gazing intently over his glasses, returning Freud\u2019s scrutiny \u2014 it took \u201c120 hours and you see the layers\u201d, Hockney recalled, and crucially, \u201che let me smoke\u201d \u2014 are the monumental etched heads, the key late graphic works, which have tremendous gravitas: Dawson himself, dealer William Acquavella (\u201cThe New Yorker\u201d), performer Leigh Bowery,\u00a0the scratched copper plate for restaurateur Jeremy King, charismatic yet meditative. There is also \u201cEli\u201d (2002), the whippet Freud gave Dawson, dozing, glossy cross-hatched pelt, tail tucked into sinewy legs, apparently \u201cthe perfect temperament\u201d for a model. Next to her, flipping back to 1944, \u201cRabbit on a Chair\u201d receives, in pencil and crayon,\u00a0the same attention to its fur.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Linear precision has become textured expressiveness, but the two works share an unbroken connection in what Frank Auerbach called Freud\u2019s \u201cattention to his subject. If his concentrated interest were to falter, he would come off the tightrope; he has no safety net of manner.\u201d That tightrope act is thrilling to watch.<\/p>\n

February 12-May 4, npg.ork.uk<\/a>; then Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, June 10-September 27, louisiana.dk<\/a><\/p>\n

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