THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021 69
posing nude in what used to be called
“explicit” positions. One feels that one
has no right to find this creepy, because
the people who were engaged in it didn’t
find it creepy, and yet one finds this creepy.
T
he great question about Freud is
how to explain the move from the
quick-catch portraits of the forties and
fifties into the far more laborious and
complex nudes he came to work on until
his death, in 2011. He was not a natural
naturist. For all the talk of his vigilant
inspection of the real world, the nudes
are stylized, even caricatural. A prime
Freud nude, like “Naked Portrait with
Reflection,” of 1980, is in its way as fab-
ricated as a period Playboy pictorial, but
reversed; instead of the nude body
stretched taut in a luxuriant architecture
of curving balconies, the body collapses
prone, with pendulous breasts, a barely
visible waist, and inarticulate legs. A fall-
down rather than a come-on.
The more aggressively “grotesque” of
Freud’s nudes, like “Benefits Supervisor
Sleeping,” of 1995—the subject, Sue Til-
ley, was indeed an insurance-benefits su-
pervisor by day, though also an artist—
are much less shocking now than when
they first appeared. A descriptive entry
calls her “obese,” but Freud doesn’t think
she’s fat. He is too respectful of her wrin-
kles. She is a Renoir nude without the
dappled light, a Rubens woman without
the delicacy of overlaid charm or fur.
One thing Freud can never be fairly ac-
cused of is treating his sitters as freaks;
the human body might itself be gro-
tesque, in his vision, in its sagging time-
arc toward formlessness, but we all share
the same sad shape.
Freud’s nudes are Freudian in another
way, too. Usually, the recumbent or sleep-
ing nude in art is highly eroticized, as
with all those Venuses in Ingres or Gior-
gione. They are allowing themselves to
be looked at without having to be pre-
sent at the scene of the gaze. But sleep,
for Freud’s figures, doesn’t involve an ab-
sence of attention that allows us to gawk;
it evokes the presence of their own inner
attention, which compels us to recog-
nize them as similarly human. We all
share one dream life, a singular uncon-
scious, in which we leave our bodies for
our minds. The soft shell left behind as
we drift toward dreams is what Freud
shows us.
All of Freud’s pictures are portraits.
One comes away from the flesh remem-
bering the faces. Throughout Feaver’s
book, the single most powerful of Freud’s
obsessions is with his models—finding
them, losing them, sometimes loving
them. He sees his subjects, both the men
and the women, not as a more or less
agreeable canvas to work on but as in-
dividuals—not types but people. The
continuity of heads and bodies in Freud’s
work is the grammar of their
humanism, with pudenda
treated with the individu-
ality that a more traditional
portrait art reserved for the
wrinkles around the mouth.
With a Freud etching like
“Bella,” of 1982, the alert-
ness and unashamed curi-
osity—the turn of the head,
the spark of the eyes—is
what we recall. The faces
are treated as uncosmetically as the bod-
ies, uglified every bit as much, but no
more so. Indeed, if one could covet one
or two Freuds for the museum of one’s
mind—which is the only place to have
them, one of his canvases having recently
sold for twenty-nine million dollars—
it might be the portrait heads. It’s hard
to find more satisfying pictures of worldly
people than his of David Hockney and
Jeremy King, or his series of self-por-
traits. They seem carved out of wood by
experience.
One of the virtues of Feaver’s last
volume is that it shows how strenuously
Freud rejected the minute, obsessive re-
alism of Northern Renaissance paint-
ing, or the horror vacui naturalism of the
Pre-Raphaelites (both traditions with
which some critics associated him), and
how he situated himself instead within
the French modernist tradition. It turns
out that what came to the rescue of
the human clay was... Cézanne’s ap-
ples. The difference between the early,
graphic, flat Freud and the later, richer
one is in his Cézanniste attention to
form-making as an act of conscience.
It’s his technique that takes him else-
where. It’s all very well to talk piously
about the painstaking act of seeing; the
painter has to translate those pieties into
a practice. In place of Cézanne’s rect-
angular, latticed strokes, Freud composes
with a strongly handled, shield-shaped
mark—emphatic swiping enforced witha persistent diagonal rhythm, so that
each sharp mark runs jagged to the next,
like the tracks of skis. White highlights,
meanwhile, are nakedly laid on, not
modulated from within the shade but
splashed down impulsively. Agitation is
the signature mark, and angst the sig-
nature emotion.
Freud, as his love of Cézanne implies,
was a Francophile, with favored louche
Paris hotels, and yet his work, in the
end, belongs to the art of his
chilly island. National tra-
ditions in art are as real (and
as labile under influence)
as national traditions in
cooking; that they alter does
not mean that they do not
exist. The British nude is as
real as the British breakfast.
Feaver quotes Ruskin’s coun-
sel to “go to nature in all sin-
gleness of heart... rejecting
nothing, selecting nothing and scorning
nothing; believing all things to be right
and good, and rejoicing always in the
truth.” Freud, he allows, thought this
seemingly irrelevant advice was “preachy
yet sensible.” Cézanne, the old line had
it, wanted to do Poussin over from na-
ture—to make something with classical
order but without the stock clichés of
mythology. Freud wanted to do Cézanne
over from candor—to make a fully real-
ized art of dense contemplation and dil-
igent inspection that did not wince or
pause at a single human fold, wrinkle, or
pelvic peculiarity.
Realism has many chapels. By the
sixties, American art had taken up the
Whitmanesque idea of the religion of
real things, the belief that all ideas could
be dissolved into actual objects, flags,
and soup cans, and managed to achieve
both its burlesque and its apotheosis.
English painting asked a different ques-
tion: What would happen if one took
Ruskin’s demand seriously and applied
it to modern painting? That was what
the School of London tried to school
us about. Rembrandt is grander, Cézanne
is nobler—but, when it comes to the
human animal qua animal, Freud has
his own place. The old English ques-
tion was what a realist art that rejects
nothing human would be like, if you
did it consciously and purposefully, even
heartlessly, but without prejudice, and
for a lifetime. Freud found out.