LUCIAN FREUD: DRAWING FROM THE INSIDE OUT BY TERENCE MALOON

The Painter Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) explained how European artists had two distinctly different approaches to drawing. The most widely practiced kind of drawing worked from the outside in, emphasising the contour-lines, the profiled edges and the outward shape of a figure or object. Botticelli, Raphael and Ingres all produced drawings of this type.

A second, less common kind of drawing, according to Delacroix, worked from the inside out, tackling the mass, the modeling, the interior rhythms and stresses of a figure or an object, yet usually not resolving or enclosing its form in a definite boundary or silhouette. Titian, Rembrandt and Cézanne all produced drawings of the second kind.

Since 1982, Lucian Freud's etchings have established him as one of the great exponents in our time of the latter kind of drawing. He is an artist who works from the inside out. Shaped by the primal strains and struggles of their sinews and nerves, the figures and faces he portrays are visibly an outcome of inner forces that grip them and mould their identity.

Freud's career as an etcher incidentally highlights the changing function that drawing has played in relation to his painting at different times in his life. His earliest etchings date from between 1946-1948 and were produced at a time when (he told Lawrence Gowing) "drawing....was a defence against the received idea of painting." (Gowing p.13)

Admirable and brilliant in their way, Freud's early drawings and etchings were rigorously linear in style, as were his early paintings - one British critic of the time dubbed him "the Ingres of Existentialism". With the precision of a fine jeweler, he would elaborate details and textures within the confines of rigidly pre-established outlines. A celebrated example of this is a 1947 pencil drawing of a man wearing a toweling bathrobe. One is amazed at the artist's fanatical patience in copiously accumulating the myriad flecks of the toweling fabric, the whiskers one by one, every tousle of hair...

This approach to drawing would no doubt have served Freud as a "defence against" certain kinds of modern painting deriving from Impressionism and Cubism, which were prone to sacrifice detail and particularly in favour of a broad, generalized view or an abstract unity of design. Freud would presumably have mistrusted any such recourse to generality and abstraction, suspecting it of being a kind of idealism, something that was incompatible with Realism.

In hindsight, it is easy to see the logic of Freud's self-protective expedients, his care to avoid everything that might vitiate the raw power of representation. He set out to abjure all forms of conventionality, of idealism, of bravura, mediation, distance and detachment. It is noteworthy how, consistently since his early 20s, his conception of Realism has shunned a photo-related or photo-derived optic - hence his famous aphorism: "I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them." (Gowing pp.190-1.)

Eventually he came to realise that his first manner of drawing prevented his painting from developing freely. Line exerted a stranglehold, robbing the paint of its autonomy. Consequently, between 1954 and the early 1970s he gave up drawing for its own sake, resuming etching again only in 1982, after a 34 year lapse. (See Hartley 1995, 9.13)

In effect, Freud had re-emerged as a draughtsman of Delacroix's second category, having begun his career as a draughtsman of the first. From the 1982 portraits of Lawrence Gowing (Hartley cat 8 & 9) and the artist's mother (Hartley cat. 20), we see how his drawing became a perfect ancillary to his paintings, aiding and echoing the nervy plasticity of his brushstrokes. Both these 1982 etchings are masterpieces of characterization. The nested, concentrically swirling lines cradling Gowing's head evoke the sitter's g entleness, the throb of his intelligence, his unworldliness and self-engrossment, while on the other hand the straying, wispy, erratic notations in Freud's portrait of his mother are disconnected and clashing. It looks like a tree has arisen in the middle of her face - a tree of pain, the tree of Experience.

One thing that makes these images seems all the more strikingly real is the irrational manner in which they're formulated. Freud's technique is irrational in the following way: hatchings that register a change in tone, for instance, can run at cross-purposes to hatchings that trace the bumps and hollows of the surface of the skin, which in turn may be tripped-up by the rhythmic relationships of line that Freud sets up through his pictures, or by the overweening interest he might develop in surface incidents such as body hair, freckles, prominent veins and acne scars, or by the accidental nicks, pits and stains in the etching plate which he sometimes likes to preserve. He deliberately sows this confusion of means, but it serves an important goal.

Because there is no stable, consistent visual code underpinning a picture, he must slightly reinvent his visual language for each new etching. As a consequence, the images which emerge retain a precious quota of awkwardness and strangeness.

In Freud's paintings, too, figures and faces are never coherent entities from the outset. Their images are a compound of separate, sometimes clashing notations synthesised into an uneasy aggregate. He explained to Lawrence Gowing: "I take readings from a number of positions because I don't want to miss anything that could be of use to me. I often put in what is round the corner from where I see it, in case it is of use to me. It soon disappears if it is not. Towards the end I am trying to get rid of absolutely everything I can do without. Ears have disappeared before now." (Gowing p.60)

Freud's Realism is at one and the same time a realism of the medium, a realism of the process of formulation, and a realism of the image. He would very d efinitely concur with his hero John Constable, whose Realism was exemplary in the same multi- dimensional way, that "my art flatters nobody by imitation, it courts nobody by smoothness, it tickles nobody by petiteness, it is without either fal de lal or fiddles de dee..." (Leslie, pp.182. )

References

Lawrence Gowing: Lucian Freud, Thames and Hudson, 1982

Robert Hughes: "On Lucian Freud", in Lucian Freud, Paintings, The British Council, 1987.

Catherine Lampert: Lucian Freud: recent work, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1993.

Craig Hartley: Recent Etching of Lucian Freud, A Catalogue Raisonné 1946-1995, Marlborough - Ceribelli, 1995.

Craig Hartley: Recent Etchings 1995- 1999, Marlborough Graphics, London, 1999.

Francis Wyndham: "Sitting for Lucian Freud", Look, Art Gallery Society of NSW, March 2000.

C.R. Leslie: Memoirs of the Life of John Constable Esq. R.A., J.M. Dent and Sons, London, nd.