Lucian Freud’s presence pulses menacingly throughout a thrilling show of self-portraits, while Gauguin, in a neighbouring blockbuster, sees himself as the suffering outsider
The first picture in the Royal Academy’s exhibition of self-portraits by Lucian Freud dates from 1948 and is titled Startled Man. It is a pencil drawing, but you would no more refer to it as a sketch than you would refer to a three-course dinner as a snack. Freud would have been 25 when he made it and, if not already married (to Kitty Garman, one of Jacob Epstein’s daughters), then soon to be so – and in some ways, its immaculacy seems to speak to that moment. The artist’s depiction of his youthful self is boyishly sensual: his lips like pillows, his skin as smooth as a sheet stretched over a mattress. Freud’s new status must, at the time, have seemed surprising, not to say alarming, and here he bottles that incredulity for posterity. You can almost hear the sharp intake of breath.
But look more closely, and something else emerges. Freud’s head is tipped back, as if there were invisible hands at his throat, or someone yanking his hair from behind. This creeping violence sets the tone for much of what follows. Freud’s self-portraits (there are 56 here, some of them rarely seen in public) are all sorts of things: tender, witty, experimental and – yes, that dread word – visceral. To walk around this show is to be powerfully aware both of his intense single-mindedness – the sheer quality of his concentration – and of his abiding fascination with the idea of the shifting, slippery self; the experience is a little like being watched. But if some red thread does link them, it is surely this inescapable menace.
Continue reading...from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/347x8vf
Comments
Post a Comment