Lucian Freud

I met a student of Lucian Freud’s, a life drawing teacher and an energetic painter. “You can die in the folds of his paint, they make you cry,” she said in a thick foreign accent, almost in a reverie. “What did he teach you?” I asked. “Mostly, to be in the right place at the right time.” The catalogue confirms that his short stints of teaching were for Freud a distraction, not so much from mingling but from Freud’s special way of mingling--which is to know through paint.

As to the right place, it does not get much more right than this. Part of the enclave of British avant-garde that included Freud’s good friend Francis Bacon, the private, literate and intense Lucian has hob knobbed with the best (portraits of the Queen Mother and pal David Hockney are included and convey the point).

The grandson of Sigmund inherits in a de facto fashion the immense mystique of the Freud name; tabled as retrograde and dualistic today, the imprimatur of the theories and the moniker hang there. You will feel compelled to intuit great reverberations of angst and id in the folds and fibers of paint so lush, so deliciously sensual, that one cannot help but wax a tad lyrical.

Usually there are one or two works you want to highlight in a review; here each and every painting is a journey into the sheer expressive power of form. Freud’s famous grandpa said that our arrogance causes us to focus on the differences between the animal and the human; in that now hackneyed observation is the idea that below personality, under the facades and glibness of real-time, we are each a fairly simple and similar bundle of instincts for repose, for sustenance, for pleasure, and connection. Whatever Lucian’s relationship to the elder Freud, that model--wrong or right--is writ large here. Every streak of puffy blue or highlight of dense imbedded ochre yearns quietly, without apology for something or another.
Freud was born in Berlin in 1922; the famous grandfather lived in Vienna, but visited and brought the grandson things like prints by Breugel. Clearly wealthy and connected in pre- and post-Nazi society, the Freuds were among the few Jews allowed to leave with their belongings. Once in London the artistic child went to several schools, leaving this one, pranking his way out of another to finally enter the East Anglican School of Drawing and Painting.

The earliest attempts of the 1940s by a still teenage Freud introduce the MOCA retrospective, which originated at London’s Tate and makes its only U.S. stop here. The works will exhaust you. They will tire your retina in the best way, for all the moving pigment ambling over and sculpting shapes with a life of their own. Also exhausted will be your threshold for raw, exposed humanity, which in day to day experience--a place I sense Freud does not much fancy--we can process only in small doses.

LUCIAN FREUD