(Translated from French by Viviane Calfon Jaslet)

With the never ending queues and the great success amongst the critics : Paris is in awe of the Lucian Freud, the workshop exhibition at Beaubourg.

Why ? Not so much for poor Lucian Freud, in spite of what the visitors and his sycophants may believe. No, the one they are really going to see, though they may not realize it, is the “other” one, the only, and unique : Sigmund Freud.

The artwork here, for the artist (most expensive alive) as well as for the public, is a simple diversion, a veil which can only obscure the vision of those who dare not see. Not only is it too academic, it is of no interest whatsoever, or almost. Whatever, the importance lays elsewhere. If you are familiar with the wonderful, frightful and harrowing Viennese Egon Schiele and Kokoshka, then it’s pointless to waste your time at Beaubourg. Lucian Freud’s art, in addition to being half a century or more too late, is much less powerful, not as good and not as “relevant”. It is however, all that is so chic and trash reflecting the trendy air of our time beginning with the painter’s choice of models such as Leigh Bowery, avant-guard performer (alias Divine), the Queen of England in person, model Kate Moss, the Baron Thyssen and others. Damian Hirst, providing you know who he is, was the only one to decline the privilege of posing. In these times of artistic draught with no superstar on the horizon, it’s no wonder that the critics hailed Lucian Freud’s pictorial genius in almost unanimous sheep-like fashion. According to Philippe Dagen, who writes (le Monde, March 11) with a touch of sane impudence, “it’s not great artwork”. It’s simply a simulation based on the academic combination of obscenity and matter.” I would add that Lucian Freud, who some dare to compare to the masters of the last century such as Giacometti, Balthus, Matisse and others or even better, occasionally to Lysippe, to Durer or to Courbet’s The Swimmers and The Origin of the World as well as to Cézanne, has invented nothing new with regards to the pictorial realism of the human body and the flesh which he smugly abuses, tortures and undermines. While pursuing his crusade against contemporary art, Jean Clair evokes the midget, as majestic as the Prince Gonzague in The Bridal Chamber in Mantova by Mantegna and the deeply moving jesters of Velasquez. Jean Clair, the “reac-ademic” that we know, by adding to a text dated 1987 in the exhibit’s catalogue regarding nudity in painting, is trying to portray Lucian Freud as an elegy of the biological body and a painter of “biodiversity” and even as a charitable humanist in a world degraded by money yet whose eye can bring out the beauty and humanity in the presumably monstrous and obscene bodies he has been painting repeatedly for the last half century. These obese creatures, these nudes with flaccid flesh and hypertrophic genitalia reject our Judeo-Christian prudishness, victims of our colorless and shapeless diktats of beauty and contemporary glamour. These slouching bodies “that even love and grace have deserted” have been stigmatized as indecent in terms of fashion and by our preponderant aesthetic norms. It is a noble effort on the part of our academic, however in vain. The artist Lucian Freud is the complete opposite to this misunderstood humanist who his very serious eulogists depict as having “an immense love of beings”. This so-called redeemer of beauty in the ugly, the enormous, the pitiful and the emaciated, who Serge Gainsbourg once sung about, is only a dialectic device. However, rehabilitating or not, praising or not the ugly, the deformed, the grotesque and the degrading is simply not the question here. The concern here is not with aestheticism or with morality, though perhaps initially for a brief moment, it is with the analytical, strictly “Freudian”, grandfather to this psychotic work who was never mentioned, never present, yet always underlying : Sigmund Freud. Seeing Lucian Freud, not for his insignificant work, but as the grandson and bearer of the Freud name makes things interesting. Especially since, as one can well imagine, our academic pleasingly writes, “the painter does not like to be mentioned with reference to the inventor of psychoanalysis” and that he has always “very carefully refused to have his work explained by Freudian meta-psychology”. Jean Clair adds that, after having previously published an article of the artist’s work in La Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, “ I caused distance in his friendship for a time”.

Let’s begin with the public. If the artist in question had not been named Freud, but Fred or Freddy like anyone else, for example Lucian Freddy, I am certain he would interest no one, especially this side of the English Channel. However, Lucian is named Freud and, as we will see, everything stems and revolves around that. Lucian Freud’s relationship as grandson to Freud is widely publicized from the catalogue to the exhibit’s billboards of Beaubourg. However, no reference is ever made thereafter to the relationship or to Freud himself. It’s as though carrying this illustrious yet heavily loaded name is simply a biographical given without any consequence to the descendent who carries the name. Assuming, of course, that nothing is less obvious, the public is coming to see above all the paradigm named “Freud” whose two names, Sigmund and Lucian are intertwined, associated, coagulated and subsumed. Isn’t the Parisian public coming to see, in effect, what it means to carry this symbolic name, to be the grandson of such a person ; a derivative of sorts, a Moses of modern times ? They are also, most certainly coming to see if the painting is “Freudian”. Visitors of the exhibit barely fantasize about Lucian Freud as he has inherited, due to his name and lineage, the spirit of psychoanalysis ; he is bestowed with its symbols, stigma, its honors, its secrets, its “eye” and its spell. The art here is to undress with a sort of cruelty and carnal exhibitionism orchestrated by the authorized “interpreter”, due to his name, in turn acting as the sadistic father to his characters (or patients), knowing all about them and projecting onto them his own social discomfort or more specifically, his own self loathing. It is psychoanalysis itself that is being viewed here (by thousands of eyes sharpened with the fascination/repulsion generated universally) as though it were placed on a picture rail, its turn to become the subliminal character in a scenario (often on a couch) created by Lucian Freud with his models, their bodies and genitalia offered to the voyeur/spectator as a holocaust, “naked as death”. It is psychoanalysis which brought to the forefront Eros as the mechanism of the psyche which, in the subconscious (or perhaps not even) of each visitor, is dissected and undressed by the pictorial interpreter of the family, the family doctor so to speak. It may as well be said that this fantasized closeness that Lucian Freud has to his grandfather; this assumed continuity of the relationship is the hidden mechanism of the exhibit and composes the essential part of the artist’s success with the Parisian public. Like grandiose and fantastic ancestor, like grandson ? Like psychotic artist grandson, like grandfather ? Is one telling the other’s truth ? From Sigmund to Lucian Freud and vice versa, will the consequences be correct (as spoken by President Mao) ? Who knows what portrayal, what agitating fantasies, what scores to settle those visiting the exhibit have with psychoanalysis, that Dark Continent…

As for Lucian Freud himself, who wants nothing of psychoanalysis and understandably so, one need not be a genius to note and often with glaring evidence that, even if not written metamorphically anywhere as such (except to be noted in the early stages of his career in The Painter’s Room where the head of a red zebra passes through a square hole in the wall overlooking an empty couch with a black hat on the ground), his artwork reflects it in its entirety and the artist even more so. From the beginning, and with each painting, it is a question of an impossible score that Lucian Freud must settle with his overbearing, invincible grandfather; an indefinitely aborted attempt to put to death the “Old Viennese” by the eternally young angry British artist though eighty eight years old today. For decades, the paintings repeat obsessively the same sadomasochistic litany of sad and savorless flesh deprived of love and desire. The artist always has the same projection, the same mimetic transfer showing the little appetence he has for himself which is reflected in the characters he endlessly paints while barely dressed or as nude as his characters and as though they were he and he were one of them. He is in fact both, as can been seen in his famous auto portrait of a nude painter, palette and instrument in hand, his feet in boots Van Gogh style without laces. His figures have empty expressions or closed eyes, with no soul, closed off, withdrawn into themselves. There is compulsive repetition, flat chronicity, an-historicity, and an impenetrable disorderly studio where only few are admitted. With persistent self auto-citation, his paintings and their subjects are never able to evolve and to transcend themselves enough to finally reach within the realms of symbolism. A venture which never tires of the repressive de-sublimation of the genitalia appearing again and again in spite of, or perhaps because of, Freud’s forbidden representation of the genital organs. These are works that never achieve exhaustion; such is an analytical painting of itself, never-ending with no escape, incessantly returning to the point of departure. Lucian Freud said, “I want to continue until there is nothing left to see”. However, what is there to see that has not been already seen hundred of times ? Then, of course, there are those hundreds of posing sessions where the artist obliges himself along with his models, or should I say his patients, to submit to the interminable duration of his pernickety brush, his posing constraints, lying down, essentially naked, day after day, on a bed with white sheets or on a sofa or, for some, sitting or coiled up on a armchair all strangely reminding us of the other Viennese Freud in question. Doesn’t all this, along with the rest, the words, the setting (locked up in a room with a sofa), the sessions and the long hours, remind us of analysis ? Doesn’t Lucian Freud, as the majestic portrait artist, take on the position of analyst for his patients, an analyst who never speaks to them, who subjects them to his presence with eternal silence (Lucian Freud never signs his canvas just as the analyst never divulges himself), torturing their flesh and their bodies as almighty creator and never delivering them from their misery and disgrace with an artistic epiphany (or language). I see here the return, inversion style, of the gestures, the practices and the neutral Freudian benevolence ; a sort of inverted minima Freud. In short, has painting as a form of auto-analysis indefinitely failed and has the artist himself, in the footsteps of the analyst and deprived of speech, become a stranger to others and solely preoccupied with painting/analyzing himself ?

Perhaps the only time that Lucian Freud broke with this inverted score settling with his undefeatable grandfather is when, after the attempted suicide of his mother following the death of his father in 1970, he began, and for nine years until her death, to paint her, “in order to save her” he said. He first painted her in quasi analyst fashion, sitting in an armchair with, in the background, a young woman (his companion) lying on a sofa half naked…Then, three years later, he again paints her resting on a bed with delicate pleats hovered over by a mirror painted with awkward childlike strokes in which one can see the reflection of the artist as a child painting the scene. It is to be noted that Lucian Freud’s mother’s name is Lucy.

Carrying the same first name as his mother is acceptable ; signing with the name Freud is not. Thus is the implacable destiny of the artist, the “Freud Man” as was once, one hundred years earlier in Vienna, the famous Wolf Man.

Gilles Hertzog

(Translated from French by Viviane Calfon Jaslet)