THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021 65
BOOKS
THE HUMAN CLAY
How Lucian Freud found his subject.
BYADAMGOPNIK
© THE LUCIAN FREUD ARCHIVE / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
A
mong the Old Masters, still-lifes
and landscapes tend to be as indi-
viduated as fingerprints, but the naked
body provokes a more generalized reac-
tion. The nude in art should come in as
many varieties as there are bodies in the
world but tends to fall, instead, into two
distinct clumps, or lines: the Suspiciously
Perfect and the Depressingly Truthful.
The Suspiciously Perfect, which can be
produced in life only by adherence to a
strenuous regimen and a certain amount
of retouching, stems from the Greek tra-
dition: all those idealized bodies of kou-
roi, the musculature of their torsos fit-
ting them like Armani sweaters; all those
curvy Aphrodites, crouching and stretch-
ing. (This figural tradition persists both
as Photoshopped Instagram selfies and,
in parodic form, in the ghastly-glamor-
ous painting of John Currin.) The De-
pressingly Truthful involves what Ken-
neth Clark, in his great study “The Nude”
(1956), called the Gothic tradition, with
the body as inherently pathetic, its whorls
of fat and collapsing muscles mute tes-
timony to the sheer absurdity of living
as a furless, awkwardly bipedal primate.
The mixed model, where the body can
be both a bit perfect and a bit depress-
ing (“I might be more perfect, if I lost
five pounds and worked out more”), is
a possibility in life but is rarely pulled
off in art.
Of that second, realist tradition, the
master of the century past was surely Lu-
cian Freud, the British painter of fat peo-
ple who own their fat—who maintain an
ungrumbling harmony with their own
imperfection so complete that it becomes
a kind of perfection. One can feel the ab-
sence of central heating and of gyms alike
in every picture. Freud was a grandson
of Sigmund, and a legendary figure in
London—for gambling and love affairs—
even before he was a first-rate painter.
He is the subject of a two-volume bi-
ography by the British art critic Wil-
liam Feaver, “The Lives of Lucian Freud”
(Knopf ), the second volume of which,
subtitled “Fame,” has just been published.
(The first volume, subtitled “The Rest-
less Years,” appeared in 2019.)
That Freud would get two volumes
of biography, and that they would be pub-
lished with aplomb in America, would
not have seemed likely a generation ago.
His reputation is itself a study in chang-
ing taste: his best work in London coin-
cided with the rise and triumph of Amer-
ican painting, so much so that even the
finest British art critic of the period, David
Sylvester—who admired Freud fitfully—
took the primacy of American abstrac-
tion for granted. Compared with the sub-
lime far shores of a de Kooning or a
Twombly, Freud’s intensely realized nat-
uralism, with its insistent detailing and
conventional, if deliberately slapdash, il-
lusionistic modelling, looked provincial
and retardataire—a local taste, like warm
beer. His reputation in America was, at
best, peripheral. “The realists, like the
poor, will always be with us,” Robert Pin-
cus-Witten, a don of American art, sighed.
Even within the British art establish-
ment, Freud struggled against the tides.
As Feaver reveals in the new volume, the
Arts Council of Great Britain refused to
include Freud in a 1974 group show, ex-
plaining that his work “represents the ex-
tending of traditions established well be-
fore 1960”—fatuous avant-gardism turned
into bureaucratic fiat, rather as if the same
council had refused to support the pub-
lication of poetry in rhyme, also a tradi-
tion established well before 1960. (The
Arts Council may have done that, too,
come to think of it.) In France, Freud’s
art was regarded as at best an oddity, serv-
ing a general French suspicion that this
is simply what the Brits look like with-
out their clothes, and why they should
put them back on.
“Self-Portrait (Reflection),” from 2002, when the artist was eighty years old. Yet, as American art triumphalism
