Thursday, December 20, 2007
Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud's ugly, compelling vision is presented in a slideshow of his etchings at Slate. Freud's work lives somewhere in the spectrum between Ivan Albright's grotesqueries and Philip Pearlstein's vacant nudes.
The somewhat glib and obvious “essay” associated with the slideshow doesn't offer much insight, but the work is all that you really need anyway. Artists present an interior world, certainly Freud posits this in his own statements, characterizing his work as “autobiographical” (something that is arguably true about any real art); but the media persist in encumbering artists with the celeb “personality” angle — the faults and oddities of the personality — which has become the default in profiles of entertainers. When Lucian Freud talks about autobiographical reference in his work, it isn't his quotidian experience to which he is referring, but his inner journey.
The poets in the realm Lucian Freud inhabits — the melancholic human spirit contained in a baggy sack of skin — are Francis Bacon and Chaim Soutine. Bacon's images of exploding flesh have an uncanny understanding: Bacon places the tormented self, evoking the horrors of everyday life, in a theatrical context — a brilliant insight into the zeitgeist. Soutine is probably the greatest of the group; his images of melting flesh sums up the misery of the human condition that is at the center of these artist's concerns and makes moving reference to global horrors.
One thing that is noteworthy about Freud is that he stuck to his guns through many “isms”. His great talent and dour spirit are limited in emotional scope, but he is a serious artist, worth looking at seriously.