Lucian Freud has died. Not to minimize the sadness this must cause his survivors, his passing has hit a segment of the art world quite hard. “I always wished I could paint like him,” says the upstate New York painter Tracy Helgeson, summing up the feelings of many of us who admired his work.

Freud had a simple method, which was to arrange for models to pose in his studio for hundreds of hours while he rendered them with a loaded brush. His stroke was planar, slow, and decisive. Flake white, which is pigmented with lead and commensurately weighty, preserved every line raked into the paint by the hog bristles. His palette was neutral, causing the occasional cheery color to ring out with unexpected force. The final results were edifices of deliberation. Portraits and figures attained remarkable presence on the canvases, true, but even the floorboards took on an existential heft.

Beyond the considerable artistic achievement of his work, we looked up to Freud as a symbol of seriousness and investigative tenacity in an art world characterized by puerile whimsy and fashion. By way of illustration, in 2003 The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles mounted a retrospective of Lucian Freud alongside a sizable exhibition of paintings by Laura Owens. Walking from the latter to the former was like changing a radio station from Kajagoogoo to Beethoven. That’s all I remember of Owens.

A few hours of looking at Freud, though, made an indelible mark. People wandering about the exhibition began to look Freudian, fleshy and worn by time. Such was the power of his vision. Ever after his works became a standard by which I measure other contemporary figurative paintings, mine included. How seldom any of them begin to compare.

This tribute first appeared at nysun.com, website of The New York Sun.

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What does a portrait depict? In directing his inevitably subjective perception to his choice of subject, and bringing to bear upon it the idiosyncrasies of his powers of visual description, the portraitist reveals as much of himself as he does of the sitter, and often more. Richard Avedon summarizes this paradox: “Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is… the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.” [Quoted in Peter Weiermair, Americans: The Social Landscape from 1940 Until 2006. Bologna: Damiani Publishers, 2006.]

A recent book suggests a more complex answer, that the subject of a portraitist working at the highest level of the genre is neither himself nor the flesh and bone before him but a complex and evolving matrix of relationships, a tissue of observation, expectation, and ego that proceeds from the painter’s perception but rapidly outpaces it. Art critic Martin Gayford is as sure a guide as one could wish for through the psychological labyrinth of the sitting, and in Man With a Blue Scarf he describes a nuanced exchange between intellects and imaginations that unfolds over time and is captured in paint.

In requiring little but relaxed alertness and the following of very simple instructions, “the experience of posing seems somewhere between transcendental meditation and a visit to the barber’s,” according to Gayford. Or that is how it seemed to him at the outset of the seven-month period during which he sat for Lucian Freud and which resulted in the oil-on-linen “Man with a Blue Scarf.” By the fortieth and final sitting, on July 4, 2004, his view had deepened considerably. His verbal portrait of Freud, based on notes he kept of their conversations; his private thoughts; and his observations of the painter at work, emerges as inexorably as does Freud’s likeness of him. It is a pleasure to read for the insights Gayford provides into this painter’s method and temperament, and for the light and playful touch with which he probes the conceptual core of portraiture, the nature of the self.

Gayford is forthright in his profound admiration of Freud’s work, asserting that Freud and his friend Francis Bacon are to British painting of the twentieth century what Turner and Constable are to that of the nineteenth. But he is not fawning: artist and model have been close acquaintances for years. His voice is droll, his humor unlabored, his diction precise but relaxed, focused but desultory—quite like the conversations he and Freud pursued during those many sittings. The book is a gem of pacing; wandering from the narrative thread long enough to outline a subtopic, flesh out a characterization, frame a paradox, or provide historical context to an observation, his account repeatedly snaps back to a description of the experience of being scrutinized by this particular painter, in this particular leather chair, in this room in this house in London.

Of course, Gayford scrutinizes right back. He reports that Freud, full of nervous energy, murmurs to himself and moves around a lot while at the easel. (Small and nimble, fond of horses, the young Freud seriously considered a career as a jockey.) He works extremely slowly, beginning in this case (after an initial roughing-out of the composition in charcoal) with a dab of paint in the middle of the forehead and working methodically across and down the face. He contemplates each brush stroke, assiduously covering the canvas inch by inch. Then, sometimes, he wipes out and repaints.

Often but not always, he talks — about old friends, chance encounters, memorable meals. We learn which painters he likes (van Gogh, Chardin, Goya, Ingres), dislikes (Raphael, Vermeer, Leonardo), and loathes (Dante Gabriel Rosetti: “the nearest painting can get to bad breath”). He prefers Matisse’s emotional authenticity to Picasso’s pictorial derring-do. He greatly trusts his instincts and often makes impulsive decisions—including whom to ask to sit for a portrait. Thus sitting for Freud is “a pleasure, an ordeal, and also a worry,” as Gayford is dogged by trepidation that his will be among the many portraits that have foundered when the interpersonal chemistry went wrong. (The book’s dust jacket is the spoiler, with a reproduction of the finished painting: a mound of black hair, gray at the temples; heavy eyebrows; a severe, somewhat elongated nose; and—a rarity in Freud’s oeuvre—a faint smile.)

The book’s best-known precursor in the tiny genre of sitters’ memoirs is A Giacometti Portrait by James Lord, published in 1965. Lord, a New Yorker visiting the great Swiss artist in his Paris studio, looks on helplessly as Giacometti, apparently angst-ridden and miserable, obliterates successive attempts to convey the essence of his sitter. Respectful of Giacometti’s obsession with failure as a method, Lord also wants the painting done and craftily intervenes in the nick of time. Mirroring Freud’s steady, workmanlike approach, Gayford’s book is devoid of such high drama, of crisis and catharsis. It hums along with a calmer but no less compelling consideration of the problematics of painting, and of being painted.

Puzzled by his own misplaced but understandable sense of propriety toward the bit of linen that bears his likeness, Gayford experiences pangs of existential anxiety. A brief mention of lunching with the California collectors who own the picture subtly underscores the idea that the activity of portraiture is itself an exchange between interested parties in which the sitter barters his time and his face to appear in a place in which time itself stands still.

The writer ultimately concludes that this particular portrait depicts a period of mutual, concentrated observation. It is an index of an interaction, testifying to a prolonged exchange of close attention symbolized, perhaps, by the “gimlet eye” Gayford fancies his friend has given his nuanced and now-permanent facial expression.

Martin Gayford, Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud. (London/New York: Thames & Hudson, 2010. 248 pages; ISBN 0500238758 $40)

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November 2 to December 6, 2006

Exhibitions of paintings by Lucian Freud are always an event. Widely considered Britain’s pre-eminent living painter, the 83-year-old artist has for several decades imparted a uniquely scabrous intensity to masterful renderings of his acquaintances and other subjects in his London studio.

At Acquavella, the most recent figure paintings and etchings show him hardly missing a beat. As always, his portraits and figure paintings seem at once acidly detached and invasively intimate. “Eli and David” (2005–6) depicts a casual-enough scene: a whippet resting in the lap of a bare-chested, trousers-clad man. The artist’s confident brushstrokes place colors side-by-side, tangibly rendering volumes and even the man’s distracted expression and the dog’s sleepy oblivion. Mr. Freud’s palette, however, has a decidedly discordant edge, with caustic grays dividing vibrant yellow-pink and reddish brown skintones; dark reds settle eerily in the deepest shadows of face, hands, and dog’s legs. Even more disconcerting are the bits of crusted paint dragged and deposited by his dissecting strokes, tokens of the sitters’ transient fleshiness.

The faces in several up-close portraits in the exhibition practically condense out of rich, jostling ochres and siennas, interspersed with those insistent grays. Working their way across the features of a painting like “Man in White Shirt” (2002–3), these notes of color gel as individuals — here, as the slender, dense presence of a face emerging from a shirt’s silky folds. This exotic updating of Old Master techniques explains why, when most contemporary paintings sport simple strip frames, these paintings feel completely at home in more ornately traditional ones.

The intelligence of the sitters shines through these portraits’ raw surfaces, but Mr. Freud’s nudes can sometimes seem more like carnal specimens. The artist’s habit of depicting male and female genitalia prominently, with as much focus of detail as faces, suggests an indulgent voyeurism. The three recent paintings of nudes at Acquavella all happen to feature female models, but, at least in the case of “Naked Portrait” (2004), the artist has mellowed slightly; the young woman’s patient, upturned gaze, along with her somewhat less unflattering pose, suggests the artist’s empathy towardher vulnerability. The burnished, silvery tones of the rumpled sheet and flesh make this one of the exhibition’s most memorable works.

One of these paintings of nudes is unexpectedly dainty in size and texture, if not subject. Mr. Freud has left most of the surface of “Small Naked Portrait” (2005) unpainted, but with a relative handful of silky brushstrokes — radiant pink-yellows edged by subdued gray-browns — the artist has palpably caught the impression of limbs splayed revealingly across warm-toned sheets.

The largest work here, “The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer” (2004–5), may also surprise viewers. Unlike typical recent work, it contains an explicit narrative — a female nude clasping the legs of the artist himself, standing fully clothed in his studio — and also renders the model with a gracefulness closer to classical conventions. It’s a daring move by the artist, though for me the humor is rather undercut by a relaxing of the usual tension in his art between detachment and invasiveness.

Moreover, like other, larger canvases here, it tends to highlight one limitation of his virtuosity. Mr. Freud’s vigorous rendering of his subjects tends to start from their centers, progressing outward in further modelings of forms. He shows less interest in composing from the outside in — that is, in pacing the overall pattern of color across an entire surface. You won’t find anything quite like the grave, measured momentum of the lifted blossom in Rembrandt’s “Woman with a Pink” (c. 1650s), or the out-flung limbs in Courbet’s “Woman With Parrot” (1866), both hanging nearby at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By comparison, parts of a foreground chair and the artist’s own legs in “Painter Surprised” tend to melt into an indeterminate zone.

By any standards, though, Mr. Freud’s several etchings are masterful. The deep, crosshatched tones of “Before the Fourth” (2004) vividly bring out the quiet gleam of the surfaces of a reclining pregnant woman, her lengthening form animated by periodic swellings of hip, belly, and shoulder.

Older prints and paintings are on view in Acquavella’s upstairs gallery. Here one can savor the etching “The Painter’s Mother (first version)” (1982), in which spare lines impart a stately measure to the subject’s creased features. And don’t miss “After Breakfast” (2001), a small painting with the gem-like intimacy of a Dutch genre painting; the artist separates, with a truly tender discrimination of hues, the volumes of a female nude from a sheet’s surrounding folds.

As with Mr. Freud’s previous exhibition at the gallery, a first-floor room is devoted to recent photographs of his studio by hisassistant, David Dawson. One of these depicts studio walls thickly encrusted with paint wiped from palettes and brushes. Another shows the artist at work, naked from the waist up, as fierce and sinewy as his paintings. Several others poignantly picture his models posing, their smooth-skinned, youthful forms being transformed in paint under Mr. Freud’s caustic gaze. These aren’t entirely heartwarming images — the artist’s obsessive purpose suffuses their space — but they’re eloquent testimony to a lifetime spent uncovering painting’s carnal complexities.

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The genius of Lucian Freud has nothing to do with technique and everything to do with energy. However much he looks to the Old Masters (and increasingly in his senior years, like one), he is quintessentially a mid-20th-century existentialist: a man striving against the odds for personal authenticity. His mentor and rival Francis Bacon coined a phrase that seems appropriate: “exhilarated despair.” Doubt is as much his raw material as paint.

Mr. Freud has a large public – when his new paintings and etchings were shown at the Wallace Collection in London last month, 50,000 people visited – and many will ask, isn’t it the sheer, mesmerizing laying on of paint, the magical mortgage of touch to vision, that keeps the eye lingering for so long upon what are, in many respects, repellant pictures?

For his work can certainly seem repellant, both in subject matter and surface, with unhappy-looking, ungainly nudes rendered in murky colors and blotchy accumulations of paint. The material facts of the paint will indeed detain the viewer, but reconciling what has been put down to the total design is more likely to confound than satisfy. . A finished work is more an accomodation of doubts than their resolution.

Those works are now on display at Mr. Freud’s New York dealer, Acquavella. The exhibition is his first since the 2002 retrospective, and for an artist of 81 who works at his agonizing pace, the output of almost two-dozen pieces in the intervening period is astounding. For it is well-known that his paintings take forever to make.

The artist has admitted that his sitters’ weariness gives him energy. Like the analysis offered by disciples of his grandfather, Sigmund Freud, the fiercely penetrating and revelatory observations of Lucian Freud take hundreds of sittings and do not come cheap. “The Brigadier,” (2003-04), a well-over life size portrait of Andrew Parker-Bowles (former husband of [either make this “Royal favorite” which I prefer, as its respectful and amusingly understated, or say “the Prince of Wales’ companion”] Prince of Wales favorite Camilla and an old riding friend of Mr. Freud’s), took more than a year to complete.

At first “The Brigadier,” in which the sitter wears his dress uniform and medals, seems to belong to the tradition of the swagger portrait, of the dashing military types and dandies depicted by masters from van Dyck to Sargent. But in key respects it is different. There is a psychological charge, a sense of a man familiar with life’s vicissitudes, that sets the painting in a nobler tradition of portraiturethat of Rembrandt and Goya.

Despite the impression of bravura in its initial impact, a closer reading of this (or any) Freud, frustrates the first sensation of fluency or speed. It has the grinding, compacted energy of a steamroller. The registration of effort and commitment on the part of painter and sitter alike lends the work extra charge.

But what are we to make of the individual brushstrokes, the bewildering spread of local decisions that make up the whole? This is where the idea of energy versus technique comes into play. I’m not for a moment denying, or refusing to marvel at, the extraordinary facture of a Freud painting. It is, rather, a question of identifying the divorce between micro-effort and macro-result.

A Freud is, in its way, as bizarrely crafted as the breathtaking little devotional mosaics to be seen in the Byzantium exhibition at the nearby Met. In Mr. Freud’s case, the tesserae consist of what Cézanne called “petits sensations,” individually apprehended details that are captured in isolated brushstrokes or intuited in juxtapositions of color and plane. But Mr. Freud’s little sensations are joined up, so to speak. He is more like an Old Master than a modern in that – in contrast to the deconstructivist effect of Cézanne’s Cubist disciples, –he constructs a compelling whole, a cogent window onto the world.

Mr. Freud’s power and appeal comes from his art being joined to the great Western tradition of depiction, of offering a singular, convincing vision of the actual. For all the local painterly discoveries, he finds the strong, linear boundary of his figures and forms and accentuates them. But he is no academic, opting for a clichéd set of ready-made solutions like single-point perspective or anatomical correctness.

Perspective seems to be made up as he goes along. “David and Eli,” (2003-04) resorts to almost mannerist contortions of foreshortening to depict the sprawling male nude and his pet whippet, head lolling over the edge of the mattress. (Otherwise, the human sitter’s protruding right leg would absurdly dominate the field of vision.) “Irishwoman on a Bed,” (2003-04) is the oddest picture in the show: cherries defy gravity to caress the sitter’s mottled, gray legs; the hands and feet are grotesquely outsized. But the incredible details make the whole the more compelling. In Mr. Freud’s aesthetic, the solid truth of full, human presence must win out over the illusory truth of optical expectation.

Mr. Freud’s art is animated to its core by a tension between the visual and the tactile. In his early work, intensity was entirely sealed within the image. The surfaces were pearly smooth, like a Bronzino or an Ingres. One critic even dubbed him “the Ingres of Existentialism.” As Mr. Freud told Robert Hughes in 1987, “I hoped that, if I concentrated enough, the intensity of scrutiny alone would force life into the pictures.” But his art reached an impasse with all this smoothness and closure: the ethereal, aloof quality deprived it of the energy he was after. He found liberation in a switch from sable brushes to the much more painterly and open possibilities of hog’s hair. The surfaces of his canvases became, like the subjects depicted, visceral and contingent.

And yet, for all his little sensations, Mr. Freud is no sensualist. His impasto has nothing to do with the actual feeling of skin: Even the victim of an advanced dermatological condition wouldn’t have such blotchiness. Instead, the build up is of pentimenti, the result of layer upon layer of correction. What comes across is not the sensation of the sitter’s flesh but of the artist’s manic attempts to depict it. If a Freud conveys actual living presence, it is because of the oddity, distortion, and awkwardness of his means, not despite them.

Mr. Freud attains a level of realness that transcends Realism – which is, after all, only a style. When you look at the cramped, tired, alternately sagging and tense flesh and bones of a Freud figure, your own body comes out in sympathy: You begin to itch, to fidget, to sense your own physicality.

It is something of a cliché that naked equals true, but there can be no denying that Mr. Freud penetrates psychological depths in his depictions of the nude. They are plenty prurient enough in their improbable postures, but he does not eroticize his subjects. Flesh is empowered to convey personality with the force, almost, of a face. In this respect, a Freud nude is the conceptual opposite of Magritte’s “Rape” (1945), which rendered a woman’s face as a torso, with breast for eyes and so on. At the same time, the face of a Freud nude resigns itself to a deanimated anatomical state of muscle and skin hanging from a skull. The head is just another limb, not the privileged seat of reason.

If Mr. Freud can recall the animal in a person, he can also bring out the “humanity” of animals: His new show is a menagerie, almost a zoo. In addition to his own, late beloved whippet, Pluto, whose garden grave is the subject of a touching nature study, and his studio assistant David Dawson’s whippet, Eli, there is a masterful “portrait” of a gray gelding, and the rear of another horse in “Skewbald Mare” (2004), both uncharacteristic in the fluency and spontaneity of their brushstrokes. It is rare to see a modern painter of animals unconcerned with their symbolism and marveling instead in their sheer physical presence.

In his rapport with dogs and horses, Mr. Freud, a Berlin-born Jew, demonstrates an identification with the upper echelon of English society. But his depiction of animals also ties him to a specifically English tradition of naturalist painters like Stubbs and Constable. (Despite his ancestry and accent, Mr. Freud is, in temperament and taste, a very English artist.) Questioned once about the erotic potential of his subject matter, he responded that “the paintings that really excite me have an erotic element irrespective of subject matter – Constable, for example.” Mr. Freud, who helped select an exhibition of Constable organized by the Louvre last year, has an etching “After Constable’s Elm” in the exhibition. Serendipitously, Salander-O’Reilly, the gallery next door to Acquavella, will show Constable cloud studies later this month.

The show at Acquavella is complemented by a display of photographs, taken by Mr. Dawson, of Mr. Freud. These frank, animated studies of the artist at work on various pictures in this show and at play – dining, for instance, with artist pals David Hockney and Frank Auerbach – debunk some of the myths about the squalor of the artist’s bohemian lifestyle. There is a fun moment when Mr. Freud leads the pony to have a look at her portrait in progress, which recalls Mark Tansey’s send-up of naturalism in which academic painters bring a cow into a gallery to admire a landscape.

This rather theatrical gesture on the part of the painter raises a question about intentionality. As his paint gets more succulent and his design hots up, the awkwardness and oddity if anything seem to increase. It is fair to ask: Is his awkwardness a side-effect of a lust for inclusiveness and truth, or a device, an expressive means of adding edge?

As if to preempt the question, in paint, Mr. Freud offers a six inch wide canvas of four eggs on a humble plate. A group portrait of sorts, this study could hang comfortably with any still life in art history. It is an exquisite homily on the origins of life and art.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, April 29, 2004

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