Exhibition
Lucian Freud’s emotionally detached self-portraits are more revealing than he intended, suspects Laura Gascoigne
PAINTERS’ self-portraits have a special status because we view them as windows to the soul. Artists, we assume, know themselves best, so their self-images must be especially revealing. But that assumption overlooks the problem pinpointed by Lucian Freud, that ‘in self-portraits you’ve got to paint yourself as another person’.
In a 70-year career, Freud produced more than 50 selfportraits, most of which are currently on show at the Royal Academy. Whether on paper or canvas, finished or unfinished, they all exhibit the same emotional detachment and the same resistance to artistic classification. True, the earliest examples flirt with Surrealism, but their dream-like quality comes from their crystal clarity, rather than their content.
To catch himself off guard, Freud set up encounters with stray mirrors
The artist’s first major selfportrait, Man with a Feather (1943), could even be read as a critique of Surrealism: in it, the 21-year-old artist holds up a meticulously rendered feather as he stands surrounded by surreal cut-out bird forms that have apparently crash-landed at his feet. Surreal birds are all very well, he seems to be saying, but they don’t fly.
Freud was not interested in exploring the unconscious; he preferred to regard himself as a biologist, the discipline in which his grandfather Sigmund had started out. In the early crayon Self-portrait with Hyacinth in
Pot (1947–48), the plant is given equal importance with the face, an approach he called ‘biological truth-telling’. ‘I have always felt that my work hadn’t much to do with art,’ he said in 1987. ‘I hoped that if I concentrated enough, the intensity of scrutiny alone would force life into the pictures.’
When directed at other people, as at his second wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood in Hotel Bedroom (1954), that forensic level of scrutiny can seem cruel.
Hotel Bedroom was the last picture that Freud painted sitting down; standing at the easel, he abandoned the painstaking precision of his early style, exchanging the fiddly sable brushes that encouraged agonising over detail
for coarse hog’s hair, which delivered broader, more Expressionist brushstrokes.
In the self-portraits, however, the agonising continues; the fiddling simply takes a rougher form. Self-portrait, Reflection (2002), painted nearly half a century later, is worked and reworked to a point where the artist’s features are as encrusted with paint as the background wall he used as a palette. ‘I don’t accept the information I get when I look at myself and that’s where the trouble starts,’ was his excuse. The man who once claimed to want to treat heads and faces like ‘just another limb’ found emotional detachment harder to achieve when confronting his own.
To catch himself off guard, Freud set up chance encounters with stray mirrors left in odd places around the studio. Sometimes, his presence is a minor detail in a studio interior,
caught in a hand mirror propped in an armchair or on a window frame. In Reflection with Two Children (Self-portrait), 1965, the mirror is on the floor and the artist looms over it at a menacing angle; in the equally uncanny Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening (Self
portrait), 1967–68, he appears like a disembodied Adam cupping an ear, his head and bare shoulders lost among the leaves of a large yucca plant. With Freud, you have to look sharp or he tricks you; the reflection here referred to is not in a mirror— the face in the leaves is a fragment of an unfinished painting.
After his 40th birthday, with his usual clinical detachment, Freud began to record changes wrought in his appearance by the ageing process. Yet in the face of his increasingly lived-in features, that detachment became harder to maintain. The thoughtfully lined face in
Reflection (Self Portrait), 1985, painted when he was in his early sixties, is about as far from ‘just another limb’ as can be imagined: it’s a character study by any other name. The milestone of his 70th birthday was marked with Painter Working, Self
Portrait (1993), the full-length painting of himself as a hoary old warrior armed with palette knife and palette, wearing only his boots, that caused a sensation when unveiled at that year’s Whitechapel retrospective.
Since the mid 1960s, Freud had become famous for his naked portraits of close friends and family members; now he felt that it was payback time: ‘I thought after putting so many other people through it I should subject myself to the same treatment.’
Naked or clothed, Freud never quite dropped his guard: ‘I have to do what I feel like,’ he said, ‘without being expressionist.’
Having started out with a Surrealist style without being a Surrealist, he ended up with an Expressionist style without being an Expressionist. Style, for this biological truth-teller, was only a means to an end; what mattered was the intensity of the scrutiny.
‘Lucian Freud: The Selfportraits’ is at the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London W1, until January 26, 2020 (020–7300 8090; www.royalacademy.org.uk)