Lucian Freud exhibition opens today at the National Portrait Gallery

Lucian Freud exhibition opens today at the National Portrait Gallery

09 February, 2012
by: Tom Jeffreys

Brave the queues - if you like Freud you'll love the National Portrait Gallery's new exhibition. Tom Jeffreys has some reservations though.

Amongst other things – the Olympics, the Jubilee, Damien Hirst – 2012 is the year of Lucian Freud. In that clustering way that always makes the art world look a bit suspicious, less than seven months after the artist's death in July 2011, London is going Freud-crazy. Of course the big news is the exhibition of Lucian Freud Portraits that opens to the public today at the National Portrait Gallery, but elsewhere in London Christie's are auctioning off a raft of Freud etchings, Blain/Southern are exhibiting Freud drawings, and Jane McAdam Freud (the artist's daughter) is showing a large-scale sculpture of her father – at the Freud Museum appropriately enough – that she produced in the months prior to his death.

Unsurprisingly, the National Portrait Gallery have been careful to emphasise that this is in no way a cash-in. The exhibition, which features over 100 works, was apparently “produced in close collaboration” with Freud before his death, and with his assistant David Dawson thereafter. At the media view – just as unbearably busy as the recent Hockney and da Vinci shows, and exacerbated by the gallery's small spaces – director, Sandy Nairne, made the point clear: “This is a living exhibition,” he said, “planned with the artist. It is not a memorial show.”

This is undoubtedly true, but nonetheless the spectre of death lies heavily across this exhibition – most notably in one of the exhibition's real coups: the inclusion of a large-scale painting unfinished at the time of the artist's death. It's a powerful reminder that even an artist as macho in his painterly prowess as Freud is still prey to the humdrum inconveniences of mortality. And it's also a penetrative insight into the artist's working process – we see washes of paint acting as a background before features are gradually built up in Freud's characteristically heavy manner.

It wasn't always like this though. And what the exhibition's largely chronological hang does very well is to bring out the beauty of Freud's earlier works from the 1940s and early '50s. There's a slightly gawky, surreal-tinged tone to these early portraits that gradually gets lost along the way – specifically when the artist exchanged sable brushes for hogshair and began to address the easel not sitting down, but topless, standing and oozing virility.

It's a shame, as the early works are characterised by a tenderness and care of technique that renders the subjects almost heartbreakingly fragile – like delicate, priceless porcelain. This is particularly apparent in my two favourite works here – Girl with Beret and the famous portrait of John Minton – as well as in the selection of portraits of Freud's first wife, Kitty Garman (angular, flat, almost Egyptian in perspective) and the very strange double portrait Father and Daughter (all bulging, glassy, cultist eyes).  

From here, it's classic Lucian Freud all the way: intense, grubby examinations of weakness and power. Lumpen bellies (most notably in the almost self-parodying depictions of Big Sue, the 'Benefits Supervisor') contrast with scrawny, contorted limbs, rib cages and jutting hip bones. It's all very focused: a small group of people (Freud's inner circle of friends and family), a small space (Freud's paint-spattered studio), small gallery rooms, and, in all honesty, eventually a little wearing. After a while, there's something unpleasantly overbearing about the confidence of Freud's big, bold brush-strokes – especially in the celebrity/society commissions of the later years.

Sometimes, and particularly in art, a little self-doubt can go a long way. It's there at the start of his career, and perforce at the end, but in between, Freud crushed it, in my opinion for the worse.

Lucian Freud Portraits is at the National Portrait Gallery until 27th May 2012.

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Tom Jeffreys