Exhibition of the week Lucian Freud: The Self-portraits
Royal Academy, London W1 (020-7300 8090, royalacademy.org.uk). Until 26 January
Lucian Freud (1922-2011) was notoriously hard on his models, said Nancy Durrant in The Times. His wretched sitters would be obliged to hold their (often nude) poses “for hours, over months, often in excruciating positions”, in fear of inflaming the artist’s infamously vicious temper. Yet he also subjected himself to the same “piercingly frank gaze”, frequently looking in the mirror to create harsh and unforgiving self-portraits. This thrilling new exhibition at the Royal Academy is the first ever to focus on Freud’s self-portraiture, bringing together more than 50 paintings, prints and drawings to chart his remarkable seven-decade career. Taking a “broadly chronological” approach, the show traces Freud’s development from his first, hesitant teenage sketches in the 1940s through to the anguished, masterful oil paintings he created in his final decades. It is a gripping testament to Freud’s “obsession with precise observation”.
Freud’s early works display a “playful curiosity”, said Alastair Smart in The Daily Telegraph. In one 1948 self-portrait, “we practically look up the artist’s nostrils”, while 1947’s Still Life with Green Lemon has the artist’s face poking around a corner, with a “humongous” green leaf as the painting’s focus. But over the decades, his paintings become “bigger, bolder and more expressive”, culminating in a set of late works in which he subjects himself to “merciless” scrutiny. Painter Working, Reflection
(1993), for instance, depicts the 70-year-old artist “naked but for a pair of boots”, his expression one of “resignation and vulnerability”. Yet this exhibition clearly exposes Freud’s “limitations”, said Matthew Collings in the London Evening Standard. He worked in only two styles: initially, poetic and stylised; later, realistic, using thickly applied paint. After looking at his work for a while, its “monotonous bleakness” becomes “alienating”.
This exhibition is certainly an uncomfortable experience, said Eddy Frankel in Time Out. But Freud’s greatness, from the 1950s on, is in no doubt. In 1954’s
Hotel Bedroom, he “hovers in the shadows” behind his “forlorn” wife; it is a “grim depiction of marital misery”. In the best works here, he is barely visible at all: in Two Irishmen
in W11 (1984), he features only as a sketch on two canvases behind the two main subjects; in the “standout” painting, Flora with Blue Toenails
(2001), he is reduced to a shadow looming over “a pained, beautiful young woman”. Ugly though Freud’s work often was, its “brutal, unflinching honesty” is astonishingly potent.