Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwood, but God too

 

26 October 2021

Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwood, but God too 

Kathleen ‘Kitty’ Garman, painted London 1947, 

Caroline Blackwood, painted in Paris, 1952

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 (Above) 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 were created in different mediums but also because they’re separated by several years, and of course, they are two different wives. In any event, his rigorous discipline to detail commands my attention. It’s a great gift when this skill doesn’t get too busy and damage the overall pictorial, or graphic unity. 

Lucian Freud had a very colourful love-life to say the least, even for a man who was 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 already? It’s a mystery. 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 in here somewhere, maybe, even an erotic one. The British are wonderful with this kind of wry, eccentric humour in Art. 

This portrait on the right, of his very young and new wife Caroline Blackwood in bed, is my real favourite. Its 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 the biography about her called A Dangerous Muse: the life of Caroline Blackwood by Nancy Schoenberger. A great read. 

Though I’m sure many Americans would disagree with me, this is the kind of thing that Andrew Wyeth, for all his technical virtuoisty and talent, just couldn’t attain despite his devotion to both realism and  humanity. Personally, I think it it has to do with the luminosity that pervades every tiny millimeter of Freud’s 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, at that time in America, being so obsessed with ‘self expression’, this old idea of Renaissance ‘plasticity’ had already been jettisoned by The Expressionist Movement.

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.”