Lucian Freud, cubism and the visualisation of art

Last Monday there was a fascinating programme on Sky Arts on the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Lucian Freud’s portraits.

Like Rembrandt he was a prolific self portraitist.

To do this you need a mirror which immediately creates a distorted image. Martin Gayford the art historian wrote an excellent book The Man With a Blue Scarf  in which he described the whole process of being a Freud sitter.

In the case of Freud this would be a lengthy process too.

The final conclusion would beeen by  3 viewers: the artist, the subject and the person that views it.

Each will have their own perceptions.

Some artists like Ken Howard stopped doing commissioned portraits because of the dissatisfaction of the commissioner.

Perhaps the most famous example is Clementine Churchill destroying the portrait of her husband by Graham Sutherland.

Lucian Freud met Picasso when he visited Paris shortly after marrying this second wife Caroline Smallwood.

Both artists who enjoyed the good life but were dedicated to their craft got on well.

Picasso and his fellow cubist Georges Braque changed the whole visualisation of art. Suddenly there was movement and the figure synthesised with the space.

Cubism  abandons conventional perspective and realist colour to a series of geometric shapes and planes which show multiple and simultaneous viewpoints.

All this leads to a contorted image which does not please everybody.

Picasso ‘s 1907 picture Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon, depicting prostitutes from a brothel in the red light area of Barcelona, is often cited as the game changer of twentieth century art.

The picture has a back story.

Picasso believed he had caught syphilis from which one of his best friends died and the picture can be seen as his revenge on those that might have given it to him.

Certainly the picture is brutal as is his equally famous Guernica which features the bombing of that town by the Condor division of the Luftwaffe.

Historians say that Goering used the Spanish Civil War as target practice for his Luftwaffe.

It’s a personal view but I much prefer Picasso in his blue period with his homage to El Greco, the painter born in Crete who studied under Titian and came to live in Toledo.

I can “get” Cubism, but that does not mean I would like to hang one example on my wall – or for that matter the rather grotesque way Freud depicts flesh.