Overrated & Underrated Artists pt. 3

OVERRATED - LUCIAN FREUD

Someone younger than me might say ‘shots fired’. No, not Lucian!

Yes, Lucian.

While I’m dumb, I’m not so dumb as to claim Freud isn’t a great painter. A quick glance at his body of work makes it clear he knew his way around a paintbrush/palette/easel. So glance…

But technical virtuosity isn’t enough. And technical virtuosity in service of egomaniacal cruelty is detestable, and if Freud was anything, it was egomaniacally cruel.

I don’t ordinarily condemn art because it’s been made by a problematic artist. You run the risk of living a life devoid of art with that attitude, since no one’s morally perfect. There isn’t a Francis Bacon painting or a Patricia Highsmith book I don’t love, and they each drove lovers to suicide, which seems objectively problematic. But Freud’s paintings are so clearly fuelled by his loathsome character defects, it’s impossible to forget who made them, which is what I do when looking at Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, or reading Deep Water.

In 1978 Lucian Freud painted a portrait of Rose Boyt, nude, legs spread, very L’origine du monde by Courbet. Boyt was 18, and also Freud’s daughter, one of 14 acknowledged children conceived by one wife and 12 mistresses. Boyt said she was ‘shocked’ when she saw the painting, which is one of countless reasons not to reproduce it here. If Freud was some lunatic naturist it might feel less obscene, but he wasn’t. He also wasn’t an artist documenting his children naked when they happened to be naked—as children—like Sally Mann did, to the objection of many. Freud was a notorious lothario, and as Boyt revealed in a memoir, unspeakably cruel. After she became uninteresting as a subject, Boyt was relegated to scrubbing her father’s studio floor while quasi-aristocrats like Andrew Parker Bowles sat for their portraits. In his depictions of women older than 18, Freud is unrelentingly realist in his efforts to depict each and every flaw associated with the aging human body. Never admiring, only condemning—this is Freud’s vibe as a portraitist. If he celebrates nature, he celebrates its ‘obscenity' and ‘unspeakable cruelty’, to paraphrase Werner Herzog.

Freud had his subjects sit endlessly while he painted them. He famously had his mother sit for 4000 hours, then showed her this:

Call me crazy, but you could get the same results working from a photograph. Or if not from a photograph, then while your subject sat for a max of three days. There’s something terribly cruel about asking your mother to sit and be stared at for hundreds of hours toward the end of her life. If you love someone and know that they don’t have long to live, wouldn’t you rather they be doing something they enjoy? And Freud was rich, he could’ve given his mother 4000 hours of beach time in Barbados instead. I don’t think this is admirable, or a sign that Freud is a serious painter, tackling ‘serious subjects’. I think it’s pretentious, and evidence of someone with serious control issues.

Freud is overrated—unrelated to being a bad father, son, and husband—for purely technical reasons. He can paint the shit out of an expanse of flesh, but so can that one person in any graduate art school program. There was a Lucian Freud when I went to art school in 1993. His name was Alex, and, coincidentally, he was also a pretentious dick who told his girlfriends what books they should read—something I can easily imagine Freud doing. Technical virtuosity makes one a great craftsperson, not a great artist. Freud’s early paintings—portraits of figure’s with oversized eyes and haunted expressions—are far more interesting than paintings like Benefits Supervisor Resting, which, obscenely, sold at Christie’s for $56.16 million in 2015.

But the early work still isn’t that interesting, it’s just less hostile and self-righteous than his ‘mature’ work. The work Freud is best known for isn’t interesting conceptually, and materially, it’s no different than paintings sitting in racks in art schools throughout the world. If Freud wasn’t the grandson of Sigmund Freud, I doubt he’d have become as famous as he did. Without his sex-obsessed grandfather, Lucian Freud’s just another run of the mill painter, good with a brush, bad with ideas—so therefore bad as an artist.