HUMLEBÆK.- Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark opens this year’s big summer exhibition presenting Lucian Freud (1922-2011), one of the 20th century’s greatest figurative artists. During his long life, the British artist concerned himself with what was right in front of him, recording what he saw in drawings, paintings and prints. Fictional subjects were never really an option.

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Lucian Freud

By Martin Gayford

Explore Lucian Freud’s intense visual world through portraiture, the human figure, studio practice, psychological presence, and one of the most distinctive voices in modern painting.

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“Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait, even if it’s only a chair” is how Freud described his view of art. Throughout his career, he applied this insight to his models, who were all people he knew. The places he depicted were also his own – most often his studio with a limited range of props: a bed, an armchair and, almost always, floorboards. His paintings testify to lengthy processes where living subjects were pushed to the limit of their endurance. For their part, the titles leave us none the wiser. Intensifying his gaze, getting up close to the subject and coaxing new insight from it, remained Freud’s method, even as his style changed over the years.

No idealisation, laying everything bare

Ranging from Freud's earliest drawings and paintings to works made shortly before his death, Everything is a portrait richly demonstrates how drawing was Freud’s starting point for recording and experiencing the world. As the many drawings here reveal, the practices of drawing, printmaking and painting weave in and out of his overall artistic thinking about what a portrait can be. The similarities and differences between these media open a window into the artist’s working methods.

Throughout, the exhibition highlights defining characteristics of Freud’s work and methods: how he viewed the work of other artists, how he challenged his early style, how the whole naked body could make a portrait more expressive – and how a head, after hundreds of hours of work, could suddenly say everything. The last gallery of the exhibition shows how the subjects closest to him – his ageing mother and the artist himself in his old age – finally fell into place, devoid of idealisation and with everything laid bare.





Human, animal or plant – a new ‘body’ every time

Freud’s art unfolded in the post-war years, just as geometric abstraction and Abstract Expressionism were abandoning figurative representation. While his art does not openly subscribe to the existentialism that permeated European art until the 1960s, it is impossible to separate his work and its unsentimental interest in the nature of the “human animal” from the zeitgeist.

For Freud, it was all about laying bare the individual phenomenon – human, animal or plant. A new “body” every time. Tellingly, the artists that spring to mind in relation to Freud lived a century or two before his time. A great realist, he was also one of the greatest artists of his time.

The Louisiana has previously presented two exhibitions of Freud’s work – paintings in 2007 and prints in 2015.