Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwood, but God too

 

I love these two portraits by Lucian Freud. The one (top) is his first wife Kathleen ‘Kitty’ Garman , painted in 1947 in London. The one below, is of his second wife Caroline Blackwood, painted in 1952. They have everything I love in a portrait, sensuality, detail and humanity. They feel so differently perhaps because they are created in different mediums but also because they’re separated by several years, and of course, there are two different wives. In any event his rigorous discipline to detail commands my attention, a great gift when this skill hasn’t damaged the overall pictorial, or graphic unity. 

Lucian Freud had a very colourful love-life to say the least, even for a man who married just twice. Unlike his paint-laden portraits which came later these early pictures appear sober, stylised and minimalist. The left one of his first wife Kitty almost feels like an illustration, a poignant yet slightly antiseptic expression and for the life of me I cannot decipher her thoughts. Is it ambivilance, or just impatience for the ordeal to be over? Because of the oddly complacent cat, held firmly in her right hand, it feels like a whimsical cartoon, the poor cat! There is obviously a hidden joke here somewhere, maybe, even an erotic one. The British can get away with this eccentrically wry humour in Art. 

This portrait of his very young wife Caroline Blackwood in bed, is my real favourite. It’s sensuous rendering in oil is delicious. It’s a mastepiece of technique but of great humanity too. It’s as good a Portraiture as has ever been painted I believe, and it rivals the best from any century. Like a hummingbird, this modern spirit of Holbein seems to hover over and around every one of its delicate details. It fascinated me so much that though I haven’t yet read a biography of Lucian Freud, after seeing this portrait of Caroline Backwood I immediately ordered an interesting biography abbout her called Dangerous Muse: the life of Caroline Blackwood. She comes from the dyfunctionally eccentric Guiness clan.

Though I’m sure many Americans would disagree with me, it’s the kind of thing that Andrew Wyeth, for all his technical virtuoisty, just couldn’t atain despite his devotion to this kind of Realism in Painting. Personally, I think it it has to do with the Light, the luminosity that pervades every tiny millimeter of this surface. It’s ‘plasticity’, so apparent yet subdued, defies the era of Modern Art being made at that time, in both Post-War England and France. Of course, in Expressionist America at that time, and being so obsessed with ‘self expression’,  this old idea of Renaissance ‘plasticity’ was already obsolete. A shame.

There is so much to say about Caroline in Bed 1952 that it almost makes me dizzy so I won’t, not today anyway, another time perhaps. It’s a thing of such rare and singular beauty that it wipes away all those ineffectual adjectives normally employed when looking at Art. But, I will cite what Freud himself once said about Painting that I like enormously:

“An artist should appear in his work no more than God in nature. The man is nothing; the work is everything.” 

 

Happy August everyone!

and XXX from the seaside here in Australia!