Following the announcement of London as the venue for the 2012 Olympics, a conversation was struck between the National Portrait Gallery and the artist, who was actively involved in the planning of the exhibition over six years until his death last July at the age of 88. The show includes 130 works, the majority oil paintings, dating from the late 1940s to 2011, and is described by Sandy Nairne, Director of National Portrait Gallery, as “a living exhibition, planned with the artist”, rather than a memorial posthumous show.
Arranged roughly chronologically, the exhibition includes Lucian Freud’s infamous nude portraits of Leigh Bowery and Sue Tilley, as well clothed sitters such as David Hockney, Freud’s own mother, and other friends and family members. The intimacy of his mature works, often described as ‘psychologically charged‘, can be traced from his earlier portraits, when Freud painted his subjects sitting knee to knee, recording every detail of their features with equal emphasis. The flatness of his early works began to open up in the 1950s when he started to paint standing up and his brush strokes became more gestural, giving his works the textural emphasis for which he is known. Freud retained the sense of intimacy and detail found in his early works throughout his career, often painting the floor as if tilting towards the viewer, and sometimes cropping the composition of his portraits at the leg or foot so that the sitter’s presence seeps out from the canvas.
The chronological arrangement of Lucian Freud Portraits allows visitors to follow his stylistic development, but the National Portrait Gallery has also grouped works thematically, encouraging a deeper reading of Freud’s oeuvre. One room, for example, is dedicated to portraits of Freud’s mother Lucie, who the artist distanced himself from as a young man. Freud invited his mother to sit for him in the 1970s when he developed an interested in becoming close to her again. Painting her allowed him to spend time with her without the necessity of discussing their relationship.
While the show consists largely of portraits of individual sitters, a number of group portraits are also included, the most impressive of which are Large Interior, WII (1981-3) and Two Irishmen in WII (1984-5). Freud portrays the individual in what is truly a unique realist style, rendering flesh almost tangible and creating palpable atmospheres. His portraits invite curiosity about his sitters’ lives, but it is in his group portraits that implied narratives come in to play. In these works Freud’s use of compositional devises becomes more prominent, and the glances and gestures of the figures seem to provoke questions about their relationships to each other and to the artist.
The layout for Lucian Freud Portraits was agreed upon by the artist and the National Portrait Gallery before Freud’s death. Despite Sandy Nairne’s claim that it is not a memorial show, there is an inevitable sense of poignancy at the exhibition, a sense that he should have lived to see it. His final work, the unfinished Portrait of the Hound is included in the show. Depicting Freud’s studio assistant, David Dawson, and his dog, the work was on Freud’s easel when he died. Hanging in the final room of the show in the spot chosen by Freud and the National Portrait Gallery, the large canvas reveals much about his method of painting. Dawson, whose photographs of Freud in his studio are the subject of an exhibition at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, appears complete, yet there is an area of blank canvas and the hound’s body is unfinished. Looking at this painting it isn’t difficult to imagine Freud standing before it with brush in hand, applying paint to canvas for the very last time.
