The Fat Lady Sings

By ROBERT HUGHES

Most artists, one imagines, dream of achieving a great late style -- the uprush and resolution in old age, careless of aesthetic risk, sometimes even a little mad, that carry a life's effort into profundity. Few, obviously, manage anything of the sort. The retrospective of paintings by Lucian Freud, 71, which opened last week at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, sets before us one who has.

To see Freud's new work at full stretch, one need only look at the final painting in the show, finished just last month (too late for the catalog): Evening in the Studio. It shows the inside of the artist's London workplace, a medium-size and undistinguished room with blotched walls. There is an iron bed on whose thin, lumpy mattress a whippet sleeps. Next to the bed is a scrawny- looking girl with an angular face, sewing an ornate piece of Indian cotton whose green and red whorls cascade over her lap like the tendrils of an exotic plant, out of place in the drab surroundings. But it is not these things you notice -- not, anyway, at first.

What you see, what confronts and monopolizes your gaze, is a woman on the floor in the foreground. Her bulk is colossal, almost comic. She simply blows away the decorum of the nude -- the ideal body re-formed by thought. She isn't nude but aggressively naked, a biological mountain: swollen thighs and belly, pubic ravine, breasts like boulders, their stretch marks and blotches half- echoing the surface texture of the girl's cloth. The strength of her presence isn't due just to her depicted fatness but to the way the image burgeons from dense paint, a heavy mass like cream with gravel in it. For in his own way Freud has done (in this picture and others) what Velazquez did: assimilate the life of the subject to the life of the paint surface and of each gesture held in it. Very few painters can do this. It is not a trick. This is the difference between painting something and merely rendering it -- between Freud's fat woman, which is radical art of the highest intensity, and, say, Fernando Botero's fat women, which are boring essays in the pneumatics of style.

Freud's last show in America was at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington in 1987. It didn't go to New York. It wasn't modern enough for the Museum of Modern Art; and at the Met there was a suspicion that, as one of its senior staff remarked, "Lucian can be wonderful one picture at a time, but a row of 20 could be a bit of a bore." Happily, the museum has now changed its tune and hung some 80 Freuds, the earliest done in 1945, the latest finished this year.

It is not, to put it mildly, a bit of a bore. For Freud, despite his quota of failed pictures (failed, however, by standards to which most living artists don't aspire), is the best realist painter alive. To watch the development of his work -- even in the abbreviated form of one show -- is like watching a wily cock salmon compelled upstream by instinct, against the cataracts of modernist history, following its desires. Most of the major stylistic events in art since 1900, starting with late Cezanne and going on through Cubism to abstraction in its various forms, have had no apparent impact on Freud's painting. He is a rebuke to superficial notions of determinism.

Freud, grandson of Sigmund, was born in Germany in 1922. He grew up in Berlin, but his parents brought him to London in 1939, barely in front of the rising wave of Nazi persecution. In England his schooling was irregular and "progressive" -- even today his handwriting is that of a 10-year-old -- and although he had some art training, he was basically self-taught. Freud's German origins have suggested to some critics that early works like Girl with Roses, 1947-48, a portrait of his first wife, Kitty Garman, daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, were done under the spell of the German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) portraiture of the 1920s -- painters like Otto Dix or Christian Schad. Actually the basis was much earlier: Albrecht Durer, whose fixedly staring, ultradetailed watercolors set Freud's first standards about the inspection of faces and bodies.

Then, around 1958, Freud took to using stiffer brushes -- hog hair, not sable -- that forced broader and more pictorially solid shapes into the paint with which he depicted flesh, helping him compose the body's structure in terms of twisting and displacement. This "Freud effect" is not unlike the quick, coarse expressiveness of Frans Hals, but less benign. A broader stroke didn't diminish the closeness of his inspection. If Velazquez had ever chosen to paint water dribbling from a spout, he might have come up with the sort of brilliant fiction about unstable, passing appearances that Freud achieved in Two Japanese Wrestlers by a Sink, 1983-87. (The "Japanese wrestlers" of the title are not real sumo contenders, but fragmentary pictures of them pinned to the wall.) There are amazing feats of sheer visual dissection in this show, such as the view from the studio window, Wasteground with Houses, Paddington, 1970-72, or Two Plants, 1977-80, in which it seems that every leaf of hundreds has been given its own specific color, structure and marking in a way that John Ruskin might have approved.

Ruskin would not, however, have approved of Freud's nudes, any more than some feminists do today. These figures, splayed under the inquisitorial electric light and the downward gaze of the artist, are the mainstay of his work, and the fierceness with which they reject the softening conventions of the "studio nude" has provoked a bumper crop of balderdash about Freud's supposed misogyny and sexism. (Freud's own riposte, in a recent interview, was terse: "I think the idea of misogyny is a stimulant to feminists, and it's rather like anti-Semites looking for Jewish noses everywhere.")

You can hardly not know -- given the amount of gossip that has lately dropped on Freud's closely guarded personal life -- that all the models are people with some specific relation to the artist as friends, lovers, daughters. But the nature of that relationship doesn't appear in the painting, and everyone is treated with the same relentless scrutiny of physical fact, so that a chin or an elbow acquires the same intensity, as painting, as a breast or a pubic mound. The results have much to do with modeling -- physical manipulation, as though the body were being reconstructed in the medium of paint, crowded with bumps and hollows, and bursting with life.

Since the late '80s, Freud's work has become more audacious in its ability to deal with extremes of physical presence without sliding into caricature. In part this is due to his finding a new model in the form of Leigh Bowery, a huge, soft, hairless, child-faced, pierced-cheeked performance artist who might, in earlier days, have modeled Bacchuses for Rubens. Freud's paintings of this man-mountain are done in a spirit not far from amazement: his + excitement in traversing Bowery's back in Naked Man, Back View, 1991-92, is so palpable that you'd think he was exploring a new landscape -- as, in fact, he was.

Life or art? Both. Freud insists that he always lets his sitters take their own natural poses, rather than setting them up -- as well they might, given the arduous business of being painted for 80 sittings or more under the glare of the 200-watt bulbs in his studio. But whether by accident or design, flashbacks to past art do crop up regularly.

It probably isn't possible to paint a naked human back without remembering Ingres's bathers, but Bowery's pose also recalls Goya's giant looming over its landscape. The conjunction of his massive and dynamically arched trunk with the waiflike body of the sleeping girl in And the Bridegroom, 1993, evokes the gross strong men and tiny dancers of Picasso's Rose Period. The lanky bodies on the iron studio bed in Two Women, 1992, are a little like Courbet's lesbians, without the Second Empire titillation. A naked man on his back, one leg up and a sock dangling from the other foot, penis flopping askew, turns out to echo closely the pose of that Hellenistic image of postbacchanalian fatigue, the Barberini Faun. And so on. Freud doesn't quote ostentatiously, but he is an artist with a full memory -- as any serious painter must be. There is no level on which he could be accused of having an "innocent eye."

Can one imagine a painter like Freud emerging in America today? It's hard to, maybe impossible. He affronts too many orthodoxies, starting with the central one: the belief that realism -- the painting of things from direct observation, warts and all -- is dead or, at best, irrelevant. You may quote the human figure from mass-media sources, by means of photography, silk-screen and so forth. Or stylize the guts out of it, so that it approaches abstraction. Or else run "expressionist" variants on it, which have nothing to say about any struggle with the real and resistant motif, since no such struggle is encouraged.

American official taste -- late-modernist taste -- shows no real or sustained interest in artists who are prepared to make a life's work out of the challenge of imbuing real figures and objects with strong plastic meaning in deep space. There are a few exemptions, such as Philip Pearlstein, but that is all, unless you want to count Andrew Wyeth's Helgas, those goose-pimply feminine-hygiene ads that are to painting more or less what The Bridges of Madison County is to the novel. It seems that with the single exception of Thomas Eakins, who died more than 75 years ago, this culture has never produced a great painter of the naked body. It's pinups or diagrams, and not much in between.

As a result, the human figure, which for thousands of years was the container and vehicle of art's most exalted as well as its coarsest intentions, languishes in late-modern American painting like a vestigial sign, atrophied. This is not because abstract art attained its Utopian ends of making representation obsolete -- we all know it didn't -- but because the culture forgot that there was anything to do with bodies and faces except photograph them. It's as though America, maddened and warped by its own erotomania, its obsession with and fear of the flesh, and further blocked by its newly acquired worries about sexual politics, can no longer imagine how to paint a naked human being. And even if it wanted to, the skills needed to do so have been edited out of all but a few art schools and are, in the main, no longer taught.

What passes for avant-garde style today is mostly recycled and tired, a thrice-dipped tea bag. There is not only a place but a burning need for art whose images are worldly, skilled, robustly embodied and keenly felt. This is what Freud, by taking nothing for granted and looking over the very brink of his perceptions, supplies.