LUCIAN FREUD
By Harriet Zinnes
From April 28 through May 27, 2004 the Acquavella Contemporay Art Gallery (18 East Seventy-Ninth Street, New York City) held an exhibition titled, Lucian Freud: Recent Paintings and Etchings. The show featured eighteen paintings and four etchings — all completed since the large retrospective of the artist’s work organized by the Tate Gallery in London in 2002.
In a sense, there is nothing new in this work. However, it is not the new but rather the continuing brilliance of the work that startles. Freud is still enthralled by flesh. It is not so much the sexual that attracts him — though of course it is glaringly there — but the animal. And it is the unhappy animal. Even if a nude male is set up near a plant of leaves, the leaves are not thriving but are in decay. His garden paintings, too, such as "Pluto’s Grave" and "Painter’s Garden", both from 2003, are not exactly flourishing — the greens seem a bit overcast. The frontal picture of a horse (naturally castrated!) is gloomy and aged. His pictures of people, whether of a young girl, a boy or a woman, are sad and apprehensive. Only the cherries in his "Irishwoman on a Bed" suggests that flesh matters, that it can be, well, a prelude to sex. These are not the dry nudes of the American painter Philip Pearlstein. These are the Englishman’s weary, but oh so experienced, painterly bodies.
