Naked Emperors: Criticisms of English Contemporary Art by Brian Sewell

Author:Brian Sewell [Sewell, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780704373433
Published: 2014-04-12T18:30:00+00:00

The proper response to this exhibition is not awe, not reverence, not veneration, but melancholy – melancholy that a man who throughout his long working life has shown flickers of promise among much dross, should now show none. In his earlier seventies Freud painted interestingly enough and with occasional fumbling insights to suggest that by twice that age he might become a consistently and modestly good painter; but now it is clear that, even if he were to match Methuselah in years, this can never be so. Far from being at the top of his form, these are among the worst pictures that he has ever painted. How is it that men and women who earn their livings as art critics are so blinded by his celebrity that they cannot see what an unself-critical old blunderer he has become, that he cannot draw, that he has lost what little eye he had for composition, that he has abandoned all interest in space, proportion and perspective, and that with his curdled and murky paint he drifts from small frenzies of acned detail into small acres filled with the dead long strokes of the lazy man who has lost interest.

For the past two decades or so Freud has been only partly interested in what he paints and even in the initial drawing has rarely been able to sustain coherence in the subject as a whole – even with quite small canvases. He has almost managed to keep control in the portrait of his friend, Andrew Parker-Bowles, fussing thickly over the face, the hands, the braided cuffs and collar, the medals and, to a lesser extent, the feet – all pockets of interest and absorption distributed about the canvas in much the same way as an abstract painter might lend interest to the surface of a picture by varying the nature of his stroke – and the uniform of the Household Cavalry has proved a useful camouflage for what would have been the bored and boring treatment of the long legs had they been naked. But the sceptic must surely see how crude and coarse the details are, how clumsy the corrections and adjustments, how Freud’s courtiers mistake crass fudging for bravura. Do the Brigadier’s eyes really look in different directions?

In The Irishwoman on a Bed, bare legs, absurdly elongated, bridge two thirds of the canvas, paint dragged along their wooden lengths, silhouetting lines defining their limits, not their form – indeed their form is utterly abandoned and they are unconnected afterthoughts to the torso to which they barely belong – this is Freud at his downright laziest, at his most vain too if he cannot see how obtrusively bad it is. With the legs of David Dawson there appears at first glance to have been some effort on Freud’s part to suggest bone, musculature and overall form but, at second glance, the dabs of paint, unrelated and misleading, break down into incoherence – desperate dabs and nothing more.

To put no fine point on it, this is an exhibition of wretched pictures by a vain man incapable of self-criticism.

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