Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open (Icons) by Phoebe Hoban

Author:Phoebe Hoban
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: New Harvest
Published: 2014-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

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Intimations of Mortality

FROM MIDCAREER ONWARD, both nudity and mortality became salient features of Freud’s work. While his paintings have always exuded a certain amount of decadence, in both senses of the word, during the second half of his life, Freud poignantly documented his own aging process—and that of his mother, creating some of his most powerful paintings.

Although over the years Freud had done many self-portraits, both drawings and paintings, those he did from his forties on took on a new meaning as the passage of time became more evident. Mirrors obviously played a role in their creation—one mirror in particular, a five-foot Georgian looking-glass he hauled from 20 Delamere Terrace to every subsequent studio for the next few decades, although he also used a hand mirror.

Freud approached his portraits of himself with the same lack of sentimentality with which he approached those of his other models. “You’ve got to try to paint yourself as another person,” Freud explained to Feaver. Still, he acknowledged, “Looking in the mirror is a strain that looking at other people isn’t at all.”

Using a mirror, Freud did three very similar self-portraits in 1963, two with his cheek leaning on his hand, including Man’s Head Self-Portrait, and one that resembles a more formal sculptural bust. These led up to his strongest self-portrait to date, the remarkable Reflection with Two Children (1965), mentioned earlier, with its Baconesque perspective.

Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud (1964), painted by Bacon the previous year, offers a clear comparison between the two still-close painters’ styles; in it Freud’s red-hued face is whisked into three twisted incarnations. No matter how “daring” he became, and how many taboos he ultimately broke, Freud remained an avid realist.

The artist constantly experimented with placing both mirrors in various parts of the studio, with interesting results. Interior with Hand Mirror (1967) captures a miniature head of Freud in an oval mirror seemingly balanced on a window sill, a quirky composition in terms of visual planes—mirror versus window. And then there is the strikingly mysterious Interior with Plant, Reflection, Listening (1967–68), in which a diminutive, sharp-featured Freud peers out from behind a flourishing spiky palm tree familiar from past paintings, an illustration to an unspoken narrative.

“There have been occasional signs of proneness to a self-image of defiant isolation, bony, even dwarfish in the raking light,” wrote Gowing of Freud’s self-portraits. “It is the only part of his work in which his enormous mastery seems as if manipulated to fortify a posture that is defensive, with latent tones of hostility and sorrow.” In Small Interior (self-portrait, 1968,) a rather antic, full-body Freud flourishes his brush; reflected in the Georgian mirror is his easel, with the start of a painting of his daughter Isobel, known as Ib.

Freud portrays himself as surprisingly vulnerable in some self-portraits; much less so in others, particularly those in which his children figure. His menacing absent presence in the startling portrait of seven-year-old Ib, naked from the waist down, asleep beneath an indoor tree, informs

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