'Girl in a Dark Jacket' (1947)
© Lucian Freud
Demurely present among this autumn's art blockbusters comes a loan exhibition of considerable power and rarity. Lucian Freud - Early Works 1940-1958 showing at Hazlitt-Holland-Hibbert, presents around 35 paintings and works on paper (all hailing from private collections) that showcase the beginnings of our finest living figurative artist in his preferred genres of portraiture and the still-life. Though, as the art critic of the Evening Standard in a rather confrontational review points out, this is very much an authorized version of the Freud story (overseen by his long-standing studio assistant / model / fellow artist David Dawson) this cannot help but be an a illuminating, surprising and intimate jewel of a show. Illuminating in that we can see Freud's origins in German expressionism and surrealist art; surprising in that nearly all the works here haven't been publicly seen for over fifty years; and intimate in the miniaturist concern and scale of the pictures. Avoiding a narrowness of view that can come with chronological hangs, juxtaposition and difference instead provide this show with an invigoratingly eclectic momentum.
The Freud we encounter here is not the well-known master of the corporeal, but the warily ambitious young man who was keen to set himself apart from his English and European contemporaries. Whether we believe that, as Catherine Lampert observes in her catalogue note, 'Freud tried to overcome what he regarded as a lack of natural ability by concentrating on very local description and by enforced stillness that aided the linear bias', that singular direction of his eye and hand into minute close-up observation immediately created a unique style. With distended heads, eerily wide eyes and an ivory pallor to the skin, his portraits to 1948 have a graphic, almost expressionistic sensibility, isolated as they so often are within the picture. Not depiction but the drama of essences. Freud told Sebastian Smee in 2006, 'It's to do with the feeling of individuality and the intensity of the regard and the focus on the specific'.
One finds no sentiment in the later pictures of his lovers, children and friends, but this stylistic manner brings an additional coolness. The portraits of Kitty Garman (the artist's first wife): the oil on canvas 'Girl in a Dark Jacket' (1947) and the ink and crayon on paper 'Head of a Girl' (1947), while hauntingly supreme compositions, betray no intimacy other than that of their small scale and microscopic finesse. An almost ruthless detailing of the stray hairs around her face gives the air not just of personal anxiety but of a larger post-war malaise. Similarly mesmerising is the pen, ink and conté work on paper, 'Man at Night (Self Portrait)' (1947-48). A technical labour of ruthlessly self-examining intensity that squares up to the void. Not for nothing was Freud christened the Ingrès of Existentialism. Anyone familiar with the commanding etchings produced by Freud since the early 1980s will be fascinated to see the beginnings of their gravitas, precision and composition here.
'Man at Night (Self Portrait)' (1947-48)
© Lucian Freud
The show also highlights a rarely credited dry humour that manifests as a genius for original and quirky subject matter. Birds in cages, birds in taxidermists cases among cacti, and birds spread-eagled on a flat surface - the 'Dead Heron' of (1945) - are not only meticulously handled, but have the heightened quality of animated characters. The latter oil has such a sense of depth that you hardly credit its two-dimensionality, a quality it shares with the astonishingly vivid conté, pencil and crayon on paper 'Gorse Sprig' (1944).
The Freud we encounter here is not the well-known master of the corporeal, but the warily ambitious young man who was keen to set himself apart from his English and European contemporaries. Whether we believe that, as Catherine Lampert observes in her catalogue note, 'Freud tried to overcome what he regarded as a lack of natural ability by concentrating on very local description and by enforced stillness that aided the linear bias', that singular direction of his eye and hand into minute close-up observation immediately created a unique style. With distended heads, eerily wide eyes and an ivory pallor to the skin, his portraits to 1948 have a graphic, almost expressionistic sensibility, isolated as they so often are within the picture. Not depiction but the drama of essences. Freud told Sebastian Smee in 2006, 'It's to do with the feeling of individuality and the intensity of the regard and the focus on the specific'.
One finds no sentiment in the later pictures of his lovers, children and friends, but this stylistic manner brings an additional coolness. The portraits of Kitty Garman (the artist's first wife): the oil on canvas 'Girl in a Dark Jacket' (1947) and the ink and crayon on paper 'Head of a Girl' (1947), while hauntingly supreme compositions, betray no intimacy other than that of their small scale and microscopic finesse. An almost ruthless detailing of the stray hairs around her face gives the air not just of personal anxiety but of a larger post-war malaise. Similarly mesmerising is the pen, ink and conté work on paper, 'Man at Night (Self Portrait)' (1947-48). A technical labour of ruthlessly self-examining intensity that squares up to the void. Not for nothing was Freud christened the Ingrès of Existentialism. Anyone familiar with the commanding etchings produced by Freud since the early 1980s will be fascinated to see the beginnings of their gravitas, precision and composition here.
'Man at Night (Self Portrait)' (1947-48)
© Lucian Freud
The show also highlights a rarely credited dry humour that manifests as a genius for original and quirky subject matter. Birds in cages, birds in taxidermists cases among cacti, and birds spread-eagled on a flat surface - the 'Dead Heron' of (1945) - are not only meticulously handled, but have the heightened quality of animated characters. The latter oil has such a sense of depth that you hardly credit its two-dimensionality, a quality it shares with the astonishingly vivid conté, pencil and crayon on paper 'Gorse Sprig' (1944).
'Dead Heron' (1945)
© Lucian Freud
© Lucian Freud
Towards the end of the show's chronological period, visitors familiar with Freud's 'Girl with a White Dog' of 1950-1 in the Tate's collection will be especially rewarded by the display of its large companion oil on canvas 'Girl in a Blanket' (1952). This naked portrait of Henrietta Moraes uncannily captures the interior drama of its subject. By far the largest work in the exhibition, its subtle colouring and composition belie the feelings of unease and discord a lingering view finds. Literally exposed to us, the young Moraes is tensely hesitant in her role of Muse (although it was a role that she was to spend the rest of her life growing into for Bacon, Maggi Hambling and others). Both revealed and constrained by her blanket, Freud pictorializes the centuries-old complex relationship between artist / model.
'Girl in a Blanket' (1952)
© Lucian Freud
Man in a Mackintosh (1957-58), a bonus to the show and ex-catalogue (along with a fascinating mid-fifties unfinished self-portrait and several early expressionist works) is the highlight. It has long been one of my favourite early oils (until now only experienced through reproduction). At just 61 x 61 cm, it is painted in the thinly applied strokes used before Freud switched to the hogshair brushes recommended by Francis Bacon and the application of paint became thicker, looser, open. However, in the comprehensive portrayal of flesh and other textures, it spans the transition towards Freud's mature style. In format the picture resembles a passport photograph: simply the head and shoulders of a man in middle-age. Here he is set against a tongue-and-groove wooden panel, but it is his posture and dress that lifts the image into one of profound psychological insight. As so often in his portraits, the subject is right up-close to the picture plane: Freud dispenses with distance and allows us no objectification of the sitter in a traditional pictorial way. The eyes are downcast as if recalling an especially haunting moment of regret or maybe caught in present despair; the head lowered to reveal slightly unkempt thinning hair; spindly dark round spectacles that somehow imply an intelligence faded into disillusion, and the mackintosh itself: the crinkled khaki collar and lapels a lovingly depicted emblem of seediness and the demi-monde. The depiction is unyieldingly frank, the flesh wearing its shadowy contours of tiredness, the sitter constructs no artifice in his dress or bearing. And yet in its way it is overwhelmingly generous: in its openness and in its candour, and the way in which Freud bathes his subject in such a warm sense of light sees to that. In this one moment the man becomes illuminated in every sense.
Rare, intimate, strange, moving, full of variety, and just so darned good: this is a truly one-off exhibition. Enjoy.
Lucian Freud - Early Works 1940-1958
Hazlitt-Holland-Hibbert,
38 Bury Street,
SW1Y 6BB.
9th October - 12th December 2008:
Mon-Fri: 9am - 5.30pm; Sat 11am - 4pm.
'Girl in a Blanket' (1952)
© Lucian Freud
Man in a Mackintosh (1957-58), a bonus to the show and ex-catalogue (along with a fascinating mid-fifties unfinished self-portrait and several early expressionist works) is the highlight. It has long been one of my favourite early oils (until now only experienced through reproduction). At just 61 x 61 cm, it is painted in the thinly applied strokes used before Freud switched to the hogshair brushes recommended by Francis Bacon and the application of paint became thicker, looser, open. However, in the comprehensive portrayal of flesh and other textures, it spans the transition towards Freud's mature style. In format the picture resembles a passport photograph: simply the head and shoulders of a man in middle-age. Here he is set against a tongue-and-groove wooden panel, but it is his posture and dress that lifts the image into one of profound psychological insight. As so often in his portraits, the subject is right up-close to the picture plane: Freud dispenses with distance and allows us no objectification of the sitter in a traditional pictorial way. The eyes are downcast as if recalling an especially haunting moment of regret or maybe caught in present despair; the head lowered to reveal slightly unkempt thinning hair; spindly dark round spectacles that somehow imply an intelligence faded into disillusion, and the mackintosh itself: the crinkled khaki collar and lapels a lovingly depicted emblem of seediness and the demi-monde. The depiction is unyieldingly frank, the flesh wearing its shadowy contours of tiredness, the sitter constructs no artifice in his dress or bearing. And yet in its way it is overwhelmingly generous: in its openness and in its candour, and the way in which Freud bathes his subject in such a warm sense of light sees to that. In this one moment the man becomes illuminated in every sense.
Rare, intimate, strange, moving, full of variety, and just so darned good: this is a truly one-off exhibition. Enjoy.
Lucian Freud - Early Works 1940-1958
Hazlitt-Holland-Hibbert,
38 Bury Street,
SW1Y 6BB.
9th October - 12th December 2008:
Mon-Fri: 9am - 5.30pm; Sat 11am - 4pm.
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