THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Wednesday, March 11, 2020 |A
about 70 years, but destroyed more
than half of them. In “Lucian Freud:
The Self-Portraits,” at the Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston, we get to see
nearly two-dozen oil paintings,
many of them decidedly unfinished,
and witness the definition of “self-
portrait” stretched to the breaking
point. For example, “Two Irishmen
in W11” (1984-85) nominally quali-
fies because leaning against a wall
behind the wonderfully depicted
gambler to whom Freud owed
money are a couple of tiny canvases
with dark smears that seem to be
the artist’s head. And “Flora With
Blue Toenails” (2000-01) makes the
cut because the painter’s shadow
falls on the sitter’s bed.
Lucian’s father, Ernst—an archi-
tect and son of Sigmund Freud—de-
signed sofas for psychiatrists’ pa-tients; his mother was a classicist
and philologist. The family fled Ber-
lin for London in 1933. Lucian had a
talent for drawing, and when he
was a teenager his mother got him
into a show of kids’ art at London’s
Guggenheim Jeune Gallery. That
was not, however, the beginning of
a smooth career. Freud was ex-
pelled from his private school, dis-
charged from the Merchant Navy as
“utterly unsuitable for the military,”
and became addicted to betting on
horse races. He did, as they say,
marry well, first to the daughter of
the sculptor Jacob Epstein (four
years, two children), and then to
Guinness heiress Lady Caroline
Blackwood (five years until a di-
vorce, and no offspring).
“In ordinary portraits you try to
paint the person in front of you,”ART REVIEW
An Uncompromising Look
In the Mirror
LucianFreud’sself-portraitsrevealthathewasasunsparingwithhimselfaswithhisothersubjects
Freud once said, “whereas in self-
portraits you’ve got to paint your-
self as another person.” Early on,
Freud’s self-portraits—especially
“Man With a Feather” (1943)—are
flat and relatively hard-edged. In
some small drawings included in
the show (e.g., “Startled Man: Self-
Portrait,” 1948) Freud pictures him-
self presciently as a kind of 1950s
teen idol sporting one of those
hanging curls in the middle of his
forehead. “Hotel Bedroom” (1954),
Freud’s “first full-length self-por-
trait” (actually, it’s more like three-
quarters), shows him standing
backlighted and ominous over Caro-
line, who looks worried and is still
in bed. (It’s Freud who should have
been worried, for Caroline eventu-
ally dumped him and he never got
over it.) It’s a great painting, with aLucian Freud’s ‘Reflection With Two
Children (Self-Portrait)’ (1965), left;
‘Man With a Thistle (Self-Portrait)’
(1946), bottom left; and ‘Man’s Head
(Self-Portrait I)’ (1963), bottom rightBoston
RIGHT BEFORE his 70th birthday
in 1992, Lucian Freud said, “Now
the very least I can do is to paint
myself naked.” Although he was al-
luding to artistic compensation for
all the unflattering nudes he’d
painted of friends, family members
(including one of his daughters, age
14) and lovers, he might also have
been apologizing for his off-the-
charts misbehavior. The man had 14
acknowledged children by several
different women, was an absentee
father to most of them, ran up hor-
rendous gambling debts, and was
given to punching people who of-
fended him.
Freud, who died in 2011, painted
more than 50 self-portraits overBYPETERPLAGENSLIFE & ARTS
daringly cantilevered composition, a
masterful array of off-whites, and a
piercing poignancy.
“Hotel Bedroom” also marks a
transition to Freud’s trademark
sausage-colored and hyper-paint-
erly style. With his palette limited
to beiges, browns, leavened blacks,
and later something called Crem-
nitz white (a heavy paint tending
toward granular), Freud tackles his
own visage again and again and
again. Repeated self-portraiture
might strike some as narcissistic,
but Freud is as merciless (some
critics even called his style “cruel”)
with himself as he was with any
other sitter. He was a noticeable if
not handsome mature man, some-
where between (for you moviego-
ers) Harry Dean Stanton and John
Turturro: long nose, narrow mouth,furrowed brow and a receding hair-
line that sprouts hair that looks
like pineapple leaves at the top of
his head. “Reflection (Self-Por-
trait)” (1985) is the iconic example.
In all his vigorously painted self-
portraits (Freud had switched by
then from smooth sable brushes to
rougher, trowel-like implements
made with hogs’ hair), the artist
looks both angry and sad, guilty
and philosophical. Freud was all of
those things.
In 1976, fellow painter R.B. Kitaj
curated Freud, along with David
Hockney, the underrated Frank Au-
erbach, himself, and Francis Bacon,
into a bellwether exhibition, “The
Human Clay,” at the Hayward Gal-
lery in London. Kitaj claimed that
the group of painters constituted a
“School of London” in opposition to
the “New York School” of Abstract
Expressionism that Kitaj loathed.
Other than not being abstract,
Freud’s paintings had little in com-
mon with anybody’s in the show
but Bacon’s. (The two were friends,
and Bacon painted Freud’s portrait.)
The other truly great painting in
“The Self-Portraits” is 1965’s “Re-
flection With Two Children (Self-
Portrait),” the most Baconesque
work in the whole exhibition. The
radical, startling point of view
stems from Freud placing a large
mirror on the floor and looking
down into it. The painting is almost
entirely gray, with circles made by
the overhead lights and a gnarled
hand that could be one of Bacon’s
eerie wrestlers, and it’s augmented
by bizarre, tiny portraits of two of
Freud’s kids, Ali and Rose Boyt,
placed in a bottom corner.
The English critic Herbert Read
called Freud the “Ingres of Existen-
tialism,” and a wall label at a Freud
retrospective at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York almost
30 years ago declared, “Seemingly
beaten by time and abuse, flesh has
become landscape.” In Freud’s vis-
ceral self-portraits it’s a troubled
landscape indeed.Lucian Freud: The Self-Portraits
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
through May 25Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer
in New York.Some of the show’s ‘self-
portraits’ stretch the
definition of that term to
the breaking point.© THE LUCIAN FREUD ARCHIVE/MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON (3)