Posted by PETER SCHJELDAHL Published: July 22, 2011
Lucian Freud was always exotic in America, because he seemed so old-fashioned. I remember decades of duly acknowledging that he painted well but of waiting for his insubordinate fame to fade away. The nude portraits that made his name maintained an old frisson—the artist and his model, alone in the studio—that had been blown to antic smithereens by Picasso, clearing the field of big-time art for abstraction and irony. So we assumed. But we didn’t count on the lasting power of Freud’s conviction that what mattered to him, as a man and an artist, mattered. Nor did we expect the exclusionary clout of avant-gardism to weaken as it has. Britain enabled Freud. He took from Francis Bacon both a growlingly bravura technique, with flesh-color paint applied like gelled viscera, and a brazening of erotic appetite and angst as all-purpose fuel for art—never mind the mess they might make of a mere life. A gamy national hero, famous for being infamous, Freud wore his rakery, gambling, storied violence, and domestic squalor like something between medals and cap-and-bells. England still dotes on its “characters.” In America, always, eccentricity is not so zestily indulged. Freud would have been clucked over and diagnosed down to a nub here. Did Freud come to tower in contemporary art, or did the ground around him sink? The effect is the same in either case. It happens whenever you encounter one of his better pictures, which sing of carnal and perishing joys and miseries in tones that carry from the Old Masters into the indefinite future of the incorrigibly human. Though he is dead now—or precisely because he is dead now, leaving all attributes of trivial notoriety to molder with the detritus in his delectably shabby studio—we can forget about forgetting Lucian Freud.
If Paintings Had Voices, Francis Bacon’s Would Shriek
By ROBERTA SMITH Published: May 21, 2009
Francis Bacon is an artist for our time. You may love or hate his work, which is still vigorously polarizing after all these years. But more than that of any other artist who emerged at the end of World War II, his work tells us about the strengths and weaknesses of the moment. For nearly 50 years, until his death in 1992 at 82, Bacon worked the fault lines dividing abstraction and representation and sometimes photography, where many contemporary painters from subsequent generations have staked claims of one kind or another. His contorted figures and portraits, his screaming popes and apes, his flanks of beef and crime-scene gore, and his wrestling lovers bring to mind any number of video-melodramatists, most quickly Bill Viola, reflecting a taste for hokey humanism, spectacle and sensationalism that often seems pervasive today. His emphasis on loaded narrative over form, which can make his art seem formulaic and repetitive, is now nearly epidemic… Yet the Met’s exhibition disputes the notion that Bacon’s art declined, indicating that it often improved as his colors brightened, his paint handling gained muscularity. It was equally important that he began to focus on people he knew and cared about, giving them faces that seem simultaneously masked, gouged out of wet clay and recognizably individual… Often we seem to see people posing in the studio, fidgeting, ready to jump out of their skins (even though Bacon didn’t paint from life, only from photographs). In “Two Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer,” the subject sits near a canvas that is pinned with a nude picture of him, which is truer to Bacon’s working method...
Look for descriptive words in this review
ReplyDeletePostscript: Lucian Freud
Posted by PETER SCHJELDAHL
Published: July 22, 2011
Lucian Freud was always exotic in America, because he seemed so old-fashioned. I remember decades of duly acknowledging that he painted well but of waiting for his insubordinate fame to fade away. The nude portraits that made his name maintained an old frisson—the artist and his model, alone in the studio—that had been blown to antic smithereens by Picasso, clearing the field of big-time art for abstraction and irony. So we assumed. But we didn’t count on the lasting power of Freud’s conviction that what mattered to him, as a man and an artist, mattered. Nor did we expect the exclusionary clout of avant-gardism to weaken as it has.
Britain enabled Freud. He took from Francis Bacon both a growlingly bravura technique, with flesh-color paint applied like gelled viscera, and a brazening of erotic appetite and angst as all-purpose fuel for art—never mind the mess they might make of a mere life. A gamy national hero, famous for being infamous, Freud wore his rakery, gambling, storied violence, and domestic squalor like something between medals and cap-and-bells. England still dotes on its “characters.” In America, always, eccentricity is not so zestily indulged. Freud would have been clucked over and diagnosed down to a nub here.
Did Freud come to tower in contemporary art, or did the ground around him sink? The effect is the same in either case. It happens whenever you encounter one of his better pictures, which sing of carnal and perishing joys and miseries in tones that carry from the Old Masters into the indefinite future of the incorrigibly human. Though he is dead now—or precisely because he is dead now, leaving all attributes of trivial notoriety to molder with the detritus in his delectably shabby studio—we can forget about forgetting Lucian Freud.
For article in context, go to:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/peter-schjeldahl#slide_ss_0=1
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/peter-schjeldahl#ixzz2JrvAiglp
Again, look for descriptive words in this review
ReplyDeleteIf Paintings Had Voices, Francis Bacon’s Would Shriek
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: May 21, 2009
Francis Bacon is an artist for our time. You may love or hate his work, which is still vigorously polarizing after all these years. But more than that of any other artist who emerged at the end of World War II, his work tells us about the strengths and weaknesses of the moment.
For nearly 50 years, until his death in 1992 at 82, Bacon worked the fault lines dividing abstraction and representation and sometimes photography, where many contemporary painters from subsequent generations have staked claims of one kind or another.
His contorted figures and portraits, his screaming popes and apes, his flanks of beef and crime-scene gore, and his wrestling lovers bring to mind any number of video-melodramatists, most quickly Bill Viola, reflecting a taste for hokey humanism, spectacle and sensationalism that often seems pervasive today. His emphasis on loaded narrative over form, which can make his art seem formulaic and repetitive, is now nearly epidemic…
Yet the Met’s exhibition disputes the notion that Bacon’s art declined, indicating that it often improved as his colors brightened, his paint handling gained muscularity. It was equally important that he began to focus on people he knew and cared about, giving them faces that seem simultaneously masked, gouged out of wet clay and recognizably individual…
Often we seem to see people posing in the studio, fidgeting, ready to jump out of their skins (even though Bacon didn’t paint from life, only from photographs). In “Two Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer,” the subject sits near a canvas that is pinned with a nude picture of him, which is truer to Bacon’s working method...
For full article, go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/arts/design/22baco.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0