“I’ve always been interested in extremes” LucienFreud
Many of his models speak about the pleasant side of sitting for him: the attention; the stimulus of his company; the fine wines and nice restaurants that are their rewards between sessions. However, there is much about it that must also be gruelling, as Freud seems well aware. “There is something about a person being naked in front of you that invokes consideration,” he says. His finished pictures, wrote the critic Robert Hughes, “bypass decorum while fiercely preserving respect”.
Unpredictability is one of the things you come to treasure about Freud’s company. There is always some surprising new revelation, frequently to do with people, art, or literature, but also, more broadly, to do with ways of seeing – angles at which to position oneself in relation to the world, to the things that count. Perversity plays a part in it: Freud is allergic to cliche, and will go to great lengths to avoid it.
When he takes against things, he does so with gusto. Although he is a compelling and very funny raconteur, he dislikes talking about his own work. “If there is a danger in it for me,” he says, “it’s physical. If I talk too much, it sickens me.”The American writer Glenway Wescott wrote about “the absurd position of the artist in the midst of the disorder of those who honour and support him, but who can scarcely be expected to keep quiet around him for art’s sake.
In ‘Some Thoughts on Painting’, an artist’s statement penned half a century ago, he wrote: “The painter must give a completely free rein to any feelings or sensations he may have, and reject nothing to which he is naturally drawn. A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.” In the same statement he wrote about self-indulgence as a discipline through which the painter “discards what is in essential to him and so crystallises his tastes”.
David Dawson, himself a talented painter, who, as Freud’s close friend and assistant, has spent more time with him than anyone else over the past 13 years, says: “Painting is a very moral activity. It’s to do with how you live your life. That is what’s so amazing about Lucian. The sheer output of work is phenomenal. He really puts the hours in.” “The harder you concentrate, the more the things that are in your head start coming out,” Freud has said.
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