The work of Lucian Freud - Paint as Flesh

	Reflection (Self-Portrait) (1985) Oil on canvas, 56 x 51 cm

From February 9th to May 27th the National Portrait Gallery will be exhibiting over 100 portraits by Lucian Freud. The celebrated British figurative painter, who died in July 2011, used Winsor & Newton Artists' Oil Colour extensively during his long career and the used tubes can be seen amongst the detritus in photographs and paintings of his studio.

Freud worked exclusively from life, usually using a nude model posed on his studio’s threadbare furnishings or against piles of painter’s rags. He would start with a rough charcoal sketch on the canvas, and then lay in the paint, working from the head outwards. Occasionally he would extend the canvas by gluing on extra strips to accommodate the composition.

At the start of his career Freud built a reputation for drawing but soon moved on to painting with, initially, mixed results. An early painting, ‘Landscape with Birds’ (1940), was made using enamel paints because he had heard Picasso used the same material. Freud’s painting curdled but it prompted him to remark, ‘learning to paint is literally learning to use paint.’

Moving on to oils, Freud, as a young painter, would sit at the easel and paint, wet on wet, using small sable brushes, creating what the critic John Berger called, ‘a painstaking naturalism.’ This changed in the early 1950s when Freud was invited to spend the weekend with the painter Graham Sutherland and his family. He met a fellow guest by arrangement at Victoria Station and Freud and Francis Bacon remained close friends until the late 1970’s.

Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) Oil on canvas, 151.3 x 219 cm

Freud’s decision to change his style at this time must have crystallised in conversation with Bacon, who he was to paint over 2 to 3 months in 1952. Abandoning sable brushes in favour of hog’s hair, which he loaded with paint, Freud stood up at the easel and developed the looser, expressive style for which he became famous. He also changed his paints. Freud had been invited by William Coldstream to be a visiting lecturer at the Slade, something which made him nervous and uncomfortable. It was, however, a friend at the Slade who introduced him to Cremnitz White, a paint so dense as to be sculptural. Freud decided this would be good to paint flesh tones, and lead whites became a mainstay of his palette. Cremnitz White is basic lead carbonate; Flake White is lead carbonate with some zinc oxide. In the early 2000’s there were plans to ban lead based paints on health and safety grounds*; indeed in many markets, these are now sold only in tins, although tubes are still sold in the US. Freud had been told by his paint retailers that these plans were afoot and instructed his solicitors to write to Winsor & Newton requesting 100 tubes of Flake White for his personal use.  

	Frank Auerbach (1976) Oil on canvas, 26.5 x 40 cm

By the time of his death in 2011, Lucian Freud had an international reputation as a bold and uncompromising painter of human flesh. He also had a reputation for being a charming womaniser and an argumentative friend.

Born in Berlin in 1922, Freud’s father, Ernst, was an architect and his grandfather was the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. In 1933 the Freuds left Berlin for London. They arrived not as refugees but with all their possessions, as émigrés. Lively and spirited, Freud’s first school was Dartington Hall where classes were not compulsory. He was soon moved to Bryanston where he joined the Oil painting club. Accounts of his expulsion from Bryanston differ. He is rumoured to have run a pack of hunting hounds through the school during matins, but art critic and Freud’s friend William Feaver believes it was for dropping his trousers on a Bournemouth street!

After a brief stint at Central School of Art, too dull and academic for Freud’s taste, he enrolled at the East Anglian school of Drawing and Painting, founded by the painter Cedric Morris. By now Freud had a reputation as a precocious and charismatic talent; he had his first one man show at the Lefevre gallery, London in 1944.

Freud began teaching at the Slade and married Kitty Garman, daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein. He took a studio on the rough side of Paddington and began to cultivate both the top and the bottom of London society. He would eat in a working man’s café, spend the afternoon in a bookmaker’s, then spend the night drinking with the Duke of Devonshire and Princess Margaret’s set. The journalist and famous Soho drinker, Jeffrey Bernard, admired Freud’s ability to straddle both worlds: ‘He has cracked the nut of how to conduct a double life.’ In 1952 Freud divorced Garman and married Caroline Blackwood, daughter of the Dowager marchioness of Dufferin, who strongly disapproved of the match. They were divorced in 1957. Critics, including David Sylvester, began to wonder if it was Freud’s turbulent private life that prompted him to paint women with the forensic harshness of his new style.

Standing by the Rags (1988-89) Oil on canvas, 66.5 x 54.5 cm

Critics questioned the merciless quality of his depiction of human flesh, the dull eye of his sitters. It can also be argued that this is what he saw during the prolonged sittings in his studio. ‘The picture in order to move us must never merely remind us of life, but must acquire a life of its own, precisely in order to reflect life.’**
Freud’s paintings were not like people, but of people.

Freud was apparently cautious of using models with exotic physiques. However one of his most famous models was the Australian performance artiste Leigh Bowery, someone who fascinated him as much for his mind and outlook on life as for his gigantic frame, and was the subject of a number of works. Later, Freud was to paint ‘Big’ Sue Tilley, an official at the DHSS. In 2008, ‘Benefits Supervisor Sleeping,’ (1995) was to sell for $33.6 million, a record for a living artist. These paintings and many others including his last, unfinished painting of his assistant and friend David Dawson, will be on show at the National Portrait Gallery.


**See our Health & Safety Section for more information
**Lucian Freud, ‘Thoughts on Painting’. Encounter, July 1954

Bibliography:
William Feaver Lucian Freud. Exh. cat. London, Tate Britain, 2002