Featured item from THE LIST: Lucian Freud: Monumental at Acquavella

In their sixth solo presentation of the late British master’s work, a loan exhibition curated by Freud’s assistant, studio manager and friend David Dawson, flesh is writ large. The show, which includes loans from the Met and the Art Institute, is titled “monumental” and fits the bill on various fronts. The sitters were large people, starting with Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery and followed up by his friend, Sue Tilley, the “benefits supervisor”; the canvases followed suit; and being Freud, the time commitment in each canvas – from model and painter alike – was commensurately prodigious. Whippets offer moments of ectomorphic reprieve from all these folds of flesh. What is most monumental in terms of aesthetic achievement in these intimately observed naked portraits is the way the human subjects occupying their outsized frames transcend the implicit theatricality and any element of the grotesque of their massed presence. DAVID COHEN