Lucian Freud

The female nude is a subject Lucian Freud had made his own - no small feat given it is one of the pillars upon which the Western artistic tradition is founded - through which the compelling originality and objective realism underlying his vision are truly exposed. Spanning more than five decades of his artistic production, the nudes constitute his most important and celebrated canon of works. More than any other, they define his commitment to capturing emotional as well as physical identity and have provided the main arena for his incessant drive for stylistic renovation. “Freud has no safety net of manner,” explained Frank Auerbach. “Whenever his way of working threatens to become a style, he puts it aside like a blunted pencil and finds a procedure more suited to his needs.” (Cited in Sebastian Smee, Lucian Freud 1996-2005, London, 2005, p. 5)

After Breakfast is a masterpiece that epitomises the living impasto sensuality of his recent work. The intimate scale here is unusual for a full length nude and Freud employs it to dramatic effect, enticing the viewer up close to the image in a manner that makes the viewing experience as private as the subject perceived. Channelling fifty years of painted experience into this jewel-like composition, the tender image stares back with the after breakfast, daylight intensity of the artist’s unflinching gaze. The brushmarks constructing each form exude an aura of studied duration as six months of sittings are impacted upon its finely tuned surface. It reveals Freud’s determined attitude to painting that has enabled him to capture the human animal better than any artist of his generation.

Foremost, it is his virtuoso painterly talent here that transforms the image into one of emotional force, for everything one ultimately feels in front of this painting emanates from the means by which it is conveyed – the paint itself. Every square inch is packed with vitality and atmosphere – the tangible by-products of his dogged concentration and acutely honed sensitivity to mood. Each rhythmic accent and minute flash of colour combine to give a sense of intensified and authentic reality. “I want paint to work as flesh,” Freud explained. “I have always had a scorn for ‘la belle peinture’ and ‘la delicatesse des touches’. I know my idea of portraiture came from dissatisfaction with portraits that resembled people. I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them. I didn’t want to get just a likeness like a mimic, but to portray them, like an actor. As far as I’m concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does.” (cited in Lawrence Gowing, Lucian Freud, London 1982, pp.190-191)

Sprawled across a sea of billowing white sheets, the model and the distinctive physiognomy of Freud’s studio are rendered with tender yet forensic examination. Rather than taking the focus away from the nude, the intricate detail given to every corner of the canvas enhances the fullness and identity of the sitter. It enables the nude to inhabit the paint of her skin like a body would a room. The juxtaposed contrasts in texture between her fleshy vulnerability, the paint rags, armchair and gnarled floorboards convey an acute sensitivity to the expressiveness of inanimate, still-life objects as well as their capacity to enrich the presence of his sitters. The paint rags in particular are a motif has employed to skilled effect in many of his best nudes, notably in the iconic Lying by the Rags and in his celebrated series of portraits of Leigh Bowery. Used to compliment his concentration upon the living flesh, they emphasise also the physicality and animalistic contours of the derobed forms they envelop. “I’m interested, really interested in them [his sitters] as animals and part of liking to work from them naked is that I can see more and for that … forms repeated throughout the body and often in the head as well so that you see certain rhythms set up … I am drawn to certain things, rather like Eliot said “I am moved by fancies that are curled” …. the insides and undersides of things I’m very often drawn to and when I’m working from a person I might use something which would actually be visible from another position because it’s something that I like that would show in light.” (the artist cited in: Catherine Lampert, Lucian Freud: Recent Work, exhibition catalogue, London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1994, p. 17)

Freud’s working method involves working on several paintings at the same time, often keeping them in different rooms in order to devote his sole attention to them. He also tends to hold the innumerable sittings required for a work (often 4 to 6 hours at a time for a period up to a year) at the same time of day – working on some at night and some in the daytime. This helps in maintaining a consistency in the strength and nature of the light. A notoriously private individual, he paints only the people closest to him. Because of this, his nudes are most often of his girlfriends and lovers; sometimes his children. As with After Breakfast, whose title tells of the time of day at which Freud returned to paint it over a period of many months, in his nudes there is often a tension between the intensely personal subjects they contain and their purely descriptive titles. Although this image betrays an intimate relationship between the artist and his model, the way in which he paints it is too fresh and too particular to be sentimental – something Freud has always sought to avoid in his paintings even when of his children.

In a further instance of his striving for the authentic, he allows his sitters complete freedom to assume whichever pose puts them at ease. In the present work as in all his full body nudes, he pays as much attention to the model’s feet as to her head. For Freud, the head is “just another limb” and his aim is for the body, not the face, to hold the expressive power.  Indeed, the expression in the face is played down. Tackling her wavy languishing form with a curious and insistent honesty that extends over hours, days and months of attention, there is a tenderness here that is heightened by the exposed vulnerability and solitude of the her pose. This is accentuated further by the view we are afforded which typically for Freud injects a conscious awkwardness into the perspective of his compositions “in the same way that life looks awkward.” We literally look down upon her as Freud did, feeling a sense of possession and control.

Freud’s human subjects are soaked in particularity and saturated with contradiction. Although immediately specific in terms of subject and pose, they do not insist on just one aspect of character or physical fact, but rather present as much as possible at the same time to give a fuller impression of mental as well as physical identity. Freud achieves this by painting beyond representation, by communicating something extra about the subject that transforms it from being an impersonal exchange into an intimate conversation. As he often does, Freud has extended the canvas mid-painting; in part to create a more balanced composition, but mainly to enable him “to put it all in”. And he has. He has represented his subject in all her humanity while at the same time recognising the essential solitude of human existence. After Breakfast reminds us of the fundamental unknowability of our fellow human beings, even when they are those closest to us. More than any photographic or hyper-realist portrait, this is a portrait that captures its subject’s fullness of physical and emotional being.