![\"Lucian](\"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/01_Man-with-a-Feather_1943w.jpg\")
<\/a>Freud was born in Berlin in 1922, the grandson of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. His Jewish family quit Germany for Britain in 1933, as the murderous Nazis cemented their hold on power.\u00a0The MFA exhibition\u00a0begins with Freud\u2019s early drawings and self-portrait paintings, rife with thistles and feathers and other self-consciously psychologically charged props\u2014as he stumbles after his own identity and artistic vision.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s his stunning 1954 oil painting \u201cHotel Bedroom,\u201d executed in a thin, clipped, crystilline manner that echoes Andrew Wyeth. In the foreground, Freud\u2019s second wife, Caroline Blackwood, is seemingly spotlit. She lies under the white covers, gazing at the ceiling, her golden hair curling down the pillow, her right hand on her pale cheek, her tentative pinkie in her mouth. She appears pensive, bored, exhausted, forlorn, depressed. Freud, in blue shirt and gray trousers, is a shadow lurking in the background, staring directly out at us. Their relationship feels doomed. (They were married from 1953 to ’57.) It\u2019s like a scene out of a bourgeois domestic New Yorker magazine short story of post World War II British ennui.<\/p>\n Freud said the painting was a turning point\u2014he usually sat while making paintings, but going forward he would stand at his easel for greater freedom of motion and expression. But I also suspect that after this he refused to ever be so narratively frank and vulnerable about his own emotional life again.<\/p>\n Subsequently, Freud\u2019s scenes retreat to studies in the laboratory of his various London studios\u2014frank, hermetic, sustained careful claustrophobic observation, purposefully awkward (\u201cI felt that the way I put things looked awkward, in the way that life looks awkward,\u201d Sebastian Smee quotes Freud saying in the 2005 book \u201cLucian Freud: 1996-2005\u201d). The scenes feel posed in unnatural light, on meager beds, with little imagination, but a cruel intense intimacy. Freud doesn\u2019t care about pretty surroundings or compositions. He seems uninterested in the personalities before him. He’s all bare bones, relentlessly practical\u2014naked flesh as it\u2019s really, literally seen. When it works, if it works for you, there’s a magnetism to his relentlessly unsparing observations.<\/p>\n \u201cThe idea of a thing being idealized is foreign or hostile to the way I like to make things,\u201d Freud told William Feaver for a 1998 London Observer article.<\/p>\n The 1960s paintings feel creamy and fast and psychologically thin, like a capable, comfortable artist without much urgent to get across\u2014and sometimes turning to surrealist tropes to cover that up. The exhibition offers a number of unfinished, unrevealing false-start canvases (too many) with smudgy, dashed in charcoal lines and the beginnings of faces. He liked to start with faces and work out.<\/p>\n One of Freud\u2019s distinctive tics, which is perhaps a carry-over from surrealism, is to often depict anatomy with a warping vision. Limbs are stretched, heads are too big or arms too small, as if he\u2019s crept into the sitter\u2019s space and is leering down from his standing position with a camera\u2019s fish-eye lens.<\/p>\n Somewhere around the 1980s, as Freud entered his 60s, his paint thickened and clotted, like aging flesh. Now he painted his greatest works: Piercing studies of flesh and its betrayals in earthy reds and tans and browns. Bodies naked, frail, wrinkled, weathered, pudgy. The body as a tumble-down house. The body as meat.<\/p>\n “I think nudes have to do with making a larger, more complete portrait. It’s a more specific portrait. I can simply see more of the person\u201d Freud told Michael Auping. “The naked body is somewhat more permanent, more factual. …\u00a0When someone is naked there is in effect nothing to be hidden. You are stripped of your costumed, as it were. Not everyone wants to be that honest about themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLucian Freud: The Self-Portraits\u201d was organized by London’s Royal Academy of Arts in collaboration with Boston’s Museum of FineArts (curator Akili Tommasino oversaw the Boston presentation).\u00a0Limiting this exhibition of more than 40 paintings, drawings and etchings to (mostly) self-portraits makes for a tidy curatorial thesis, but is too narrow. Leaving out Frued\u2019s depictions of family members and close friends, frank and naked and blotchy, doesn\u2019t show Freud at his most interesting or complex. It reduces the weirdness of how he viewed the people close to him. Freud\u2019s paintings can often feel like an assertion of macho power, of dominance. They can also\u00a0give the disconcerting feeling of the artist projecting his sense of his old body\u2019s failings onto the young naked women whom he scrutinizes.<\/p>\n The exhibition seems to acknowledge that the self-portraits aren’t enough by including, near the end, “Two Irishmen in W11,” a 1984-85 painting of two men in suits, and \u201cFlora with Blue Toenails,\u201d a 2000-2001 painting of a nude young woman sprawled on a bed, with Freud\u2019s own leering shadow creeping up the edge of the sheets.<\/p>\n If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n Lucian Freud glowers out of many of his paintings in the modest exhibition \u201cLucian Freud: The Self-Portraits\u201d on view at Boston\u2019s Museum of Fine Arts from March 1 to May 5, 2020. During Freud\u2019s lifetime (1922-2011), the British painter pursued a path outside the mainstream of 20th century Western modernist abstraction to become renowned as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15377,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[37,700,216],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15318"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15318"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15463,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15318\/revisions\/15463"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>
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