Phoebe Hoban, 2014
THE EDITORS, 2011
Franklin Einspruch, 2011
Stephen Maine, 2011
John Goodrich, 2006
David Cohen, 2004

More information on the artist can be found at Acquavella Galleries.

Full index entry for “Lucian Freud” at artcritical

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In 1990, Lucian Freud found his next great subject, an over-the-top Australian performance artist named Leigh Bowery, whom Freud first met at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, where Bowery had done a week-long installation piece starring himself in an array of exotic getups a few years earlier. Wynn Evans and Cook arranged a meeting between the artist and the flamboyantly-dressed performer (sequins were a favorite motif) at Harry’s Bar, because they wanted to “get one back on Lucian …all those sequins. We thought we’d get Lucian to put that old beige paint away.”

Freud had seen Bowery around before and been impressed by his monolithic legs. A massive man capable of extraordinary physical flexibility, Bowery had the big bald head of a Buddha. Using Bowery as a model over the next four years, until his death from AIDS on December 31, 1994, Freud produced some of the most astonishing work of his career, paintings monumental in both their scale and sensibility.

Freud once said that sculpture was his first love, and he owned a copy of Rodin’s Balzac, which occupied a place of honor at the head of the Holland Park stairs, guarding the studio entrance. Bowery’s form naturally lent itself to a sculptural approach, and Freud energetically exploited the potential of both his huge figure and his ability to maintain contorted poses. The two were highly attuned to each other. As a performance artist, Bowery, who had many body piercings, was usually turned out in full regalia, from quirky clothes to jewelry. But when he first entered Freud’s studio, he simply stripped and removed all his studs, without Freud’s bidding. He wore no makeup, and he shaved himself from head to foot, to afford the artist even fuller exposure.

In the first portrait, Leigh Bowery (Seated) 1990, his figure overwhelms a red armchair. Indeed, Freud kept enlarging the canvas with new strips in order to contain him. And yet, as large as he was, Bowery had an almost dancerly grace. Even in a seemingly straightforward pose like that of Naked Man, Back View (1991–92), where only the model’s back is shown as he sits on a low ottoman, Freud managed to capture a sense of both the baroque and the Buddha-like embedded in Bowery’s presence.

He was inspired both by Bowery’s “wonderfully buoyant bulk” and “the quality of his mind.” Freud described Bowery, as “very aware, very relaxed, and very encouraging in the way that physical presence can be. His feelings about clothes extend to his physiognomy even, so that the way he edits his body is amazingly aware and amazingly abandoned.”

Nude with Leg Up, painted in 1992, shows Bowery reclining on the studio floorboards, amidst a sea of Freud’s painting rags, one leg improbably propped up on a green-striped mattress. For once he looks life-size rather than larger than life, since Freud has him anchor the center of the composition, which is made up of the mattress, the rags, the floorboards and the bottom of a window. In Leigh under the Skylight (1994), the model is standing on a covered table, his head poking up towards the ceiling. Although his ankles are delicately crossed, his huge body is torqued in a pose that recalls Rodin.

Freud also painted Bowery lying naked on a bed with Nicola Bateman, who worked with him and married him not long before his death. And the Bridegroom (1993) is a painterly performance piece, a theatrical composition rendered in a hushed palette that heightens the drama. A bed, heavily draped in a beige sheet, sits in front of a black folding screen. The background of the painting consists simply of brown floorboards and yellowish walls. Bowery and Bateman, both nude, lie in state on the bed, sculptures on a pedestal, their heads turned away from each other. Bateman, a thin but rounded figure, has one slender ankle draped over Bowery’s thick thigh; her long hair flows off the edge of the bed. Named after a line in an A. E. Housman poem (although Bowery wanted Freud to call it “A Fag and his Hag”), it’s a one-act tour de force. “I’ve always been interested in bringing a certain kind of drama to portraiture,” Freud said, “the kind of drama that I found in paintings of the past. If a painting doesn’t have drama, it doesn’t work; it’s just paint out of the tube.”

Nicola Bateman appears in several other paintings, including a poignant footnote to Bowery’s death, the strange piece Girl Sitting in the Attic Doorway (1995), which shows the naked Bateman perched in an alcove above a wardrobe. “As he was coming towards the end of painting…it was around that time that Leigh started to die… And I would sit up there. And I spent the whole time just thinking about Leigh…and that he’s dying right now. I think it gave me a little bit of breathing space from the situation.” When Bowery died, Freud had his body flown back to Australia.

Excerpted from “Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open” by Phoebe Hoban. ©2014 by Phoebe Hoban. Published by Amazon Publishing/New Harvest April 2014. All Rights Reserved.

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The shows to be considered at the National Academy October 26 at 6.30 PM by David Cohen and his guests Nora Griffin, Phoebe Hoban and Donald B. Kuspit are as follows: Louise Fishman, at Cheim & Read (547 West 25 Street, 212 242 7727); Casey Jex Smith: Fiend In The Void, Based On The Romney Campaign, at Allegra LaViola Gallery (179 East Broadway, 917 463 3901); Michelle Stuart: Palimpsests, at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, 535 West 22 Street, 6th Floor, 212 255 8450 and Tatzu Nishi: Discovering Columbus, a project organized by the Public Art Fund, at Columbus Circle (8th Avenue/Broadway/West 59 Street, 212 980 4575).

To view Discovering Columbus online reservation is required at publicartfund.org.

The National Academy is at 1083 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street. Admission is $12 ($7 for students and seniors, free for National Academicians and students of the NA Schools.)

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In 1974, a decade before her death, Alice Neel was the subject of a career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Spanning the previous 40 years, the exhibition included 58 portraits, the genre for which, then as now, Neel is best known. In her absorbing biography, Phoebe Hoban quotes Neel on her approach to her work and her interest in the dark side of her sitter’s psyche: “I am never arbitrary. Before painting I talk to my sitters and they unconsciously assume their most typical pose—which, in a way, involved all their character and social standing; what the world has done to them and their retaliation” (p. 305). Such is the unending fascination of her work: her knack for getting under her sitter’s skin, behind the façade of physiognomy and comportment, and expose something raw and real. The reader of Hoban’s study gathers that Neel’s portraiture was, sometimes quite consciously, itself a form of retaliation against what the world had done to her.

Neel’s struggle began early, as a high-strung, unhappy girl caught in the conformity of small-town life in Colwyn, PA. Her mother was tough, stern, and misogynistic in her abysmal view of what young women—including her daughter—should hope to achieve. But her dominant personality provided an emotional and intellectual focus for the young Neel, who later attributed her own powers of observation to early training in reading her mother’s face for clues to her mood. (Her father was meek and distant; when in her mid-30’s, Neel attempted suicide by putting her head in an oven, her father mused aloud at how high the gas bill would be.)

Neel received her most salient art training at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, where she was strongly influenced by the pedagogical philosophy of Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit. Wildly popular when it was published in 1923 and still widely read, the book proselytizes for everyday subject matter, emotional expressiveness, and a direct, alla prima method of which drawing was to be the basis. Neel would put these principles into action in her own work, with a twist.

She married the Cuban painter Carlos Enriquez in 1925 and spent much of the next year in Havana living with her husband’s family and traveling to the poor sections of town to paint. Her work from this period, which was in synch with the concern for the “emotions of everyday life” championed by the painters of the Vanguardia movement and the Grupo Minorista, positioned her in sympathy with the social realism that would preoccupy American artists on the Left during the 1930’s.

Meanwhile Neel’s personal life was a mess. After returning to the States, the impoverished couple lost their first daughter to diphtheria at the age of six months; Carlos left Neel shortly thereafter taking their second child, also a daughter, from whom Neel remained permanently estranged. For decades, she had several troubled, sometimes destructive relationships with men. One lover reportedly slashed a number of Neel’s paintings in a jealous rage; another, a “brilliant autodidact” and a volatile, sadistic bully, mercilessly persecuted her sons.

But then, Neel “seemed to thrive on drama and discordance” (p. 208); she painted continuously. In this she was greatly aided by the WPA’s Easel Painting Project, which employed her from the mid-1930’s until its cessation in the early 40’s. (Hoban’s overview of the radical political and artistic cross-currents of this milieu is superb.) Surrounded by kindred spirits in then-bohemian Greenwich Village, Neel’s nonconformist streak blossomed. Her gift—and it was awesome, even then—was her ability to nail her subject’s vulnerabilities and the effort to mask them. This facility was feared as much as admired. Joseph Solman, a painter and friend from the WPA years, said, “If she did a portrait of you, you wouldn’t recognize yourself, what she would do with you. She would almost disembowel you, so I was afraid to pose for her” (p. 108).

Of her dual portrait of Milton Resnick and Pat Pasloff, the critic Harold Rosenberg suggested that Neel “have that in a tent and charge a dollar admission.” In ARTnews, Valerie Peterson wrote that the portrait “really belongs in the closet with the skeletons” (p. 245). The homeless, eccentric Village character Joe Gould was pleased with his 1933 portrait in which, with a gleeful smirk, he displays his three sets of genitals. Said Gould of the bizarre painting, “it was not really a nude because I insisted on a cigarette holder” (p 94).

Her portrayals of the innocent and beloved could be tender, as in her paintings of her sons, Hartley and Richard, and of her neighbors in Spanish Harlem where she lived and worked for twenty years. Her nonfigurative work is often richly introspective, as if an elevated train track or snow-covered fire escape might symbolize human aspiration or frailty. And in portraying Andy Warhol (1970) she gives herself over to her subject’s predilection to remain a cipher; drawing his eyelids closed, he displays his lurid scars and his pristine footwear.

But her most brutal portraits combine the grotesqueries of Ensor, the bleakness of Munch, and the subtlety of a sledgehammer. She renders the unpopular director of the WPA’s Artist Project, Audrey McMahon (1940) in joyless grays and browns, as a sort of desiccated vampire with eyes like trapdoors, a nose like a newel post, and a clenched, lipless mouth. Ellie Poindexter (1962), a dealer who did not warm to Neel’s professional advances, looks, with her beady eyes, slit of a mouth, and prominent breasts, like a python who has just swallowed a pair of hamsters. Even Frank O’Hara, the much-liked poet and curator whom Neel sought out in the hopes of interesting him in her work, comes in for some rough treatment in a 1960 portrait. Reproduced in ARTnews, it was a career milestone, but Irving Sandler turned down Neel’s request to paint him because “she was like a voodoo person who would stick pins in me” (p. 246).

Despite or because of this aspect of Neel’s output—the “deliberate hideousness” ARTnews had chastised her for in the 40’s—her work struck a chord with the art world in the early 1960’s. Having achieved some visibility in the heyday of class-struggle art for her depictions of the downtrodden (who were often, in fact, her friends and neighbors), Neel was marginalized during the ascendency of Abstract Expressionism, the “great broom that swept everything else away.” But in the context of renewed interest in the human figure that was a hallmark of Pop, Neel’s tenacity gained traction.

Not that she was universally popular. Elke Solomon, curator of prints and drawings (not paintings) at the Whitney in 1974, organized the Neel retrospective. “A nasty piece of work,” she said of Neel years later (p. 289). The artist May Stevens rejects the notion that Neel was some sort of protofeminist: “She wasn’t a feminist—she was an Alice Neelist… She was totally antifeminist and antiwomen… I didn’t want anything to do with Alice” (p. 267). With her outrageous anecdotes and salty humor, she was a hit on the college lecture circuit, but feminist intellectuals felt she contributed to a cliché by discussing her work in an autobiographical, rather than a conceptual and/or historical, context. Nothing if not self-aware, Neel no doubt judged that the spectacle of a sweet-faced, gray-haired older woman giving voice to a libidinous turn of mind and a profoundly nonconformist world view would have a broader appeal—a bit of the old “drama and discordance” played for laughs.

All of which is to say that Neel did not much care whose feathers she ruffled. The world had roughed her up pretty good but she gave as well as she got. Hoban theorizes that Neel “didn’t see her subjects just as victims; she also saw them as survivors, however scarred. As such, almost all Neel’s subjects mirror her own identity” (p. 331). This seems right, but it doesn’t go far enough. The invasiveness of Neel’s portraits became her persona. Under the guise of probing others she used portraiture to retaliate against the world for the many psychic wounds she sustained. This is what made her tick, and what makes the uncomfortable, aggressive edge of her work so compelling.

Phoebe Hoban: Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty (New York: St. Martin’s Press, December 2010. ISBN: 978-0-312-60748-7 512 pages, plus one 8-page b&w photo insert and two 8-page color photo inserts. $35 ($16.99 ebook)

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