Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open by Phoebe HobanMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Wow.
I never respected the artist Lucian Freud nor his unsettling work.
Now, at least, I understand how the man was driven by his deep-seated, personal need to dominate - to command obedience even from the very colors going down onto the canvas. He mixed specific paint for every individual brush stroke. He persevered in his life's work until the very light, itself, at last seemed subservient to him as he worked his will on the surfaces of the paintings.
Of course, we knew that the works of Lucian Freud, themselves, were nothing like any before or since. They stand alone as one man's expressionistic/surrealistic vision of the world as only he saw it; his own lusts, fears, doubts, inability to accept less than absolute control, were all reflected in the eyes of his subjects who sat for hours, weeks, months for him to complete one portrait.
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| Working document retrieved from Bacon's studio showing Lucian Freud photographed by Daniel Earson. |
That he could compel everyone he knew, both men and women - beautiful and not - to throw off their clothing and assume unfavorable positions (to the viewer) for him is, itself, a sign of how Freud surreptitiously commanded complete obedience from his family and friends.
I won't go into all of that now. The grandson of Sigmund Freud - compulsive gambler, risk taker, filling London from corner to corner with his illegitimate children and cast-off lovers, painting all night and most of the day, using his own unclothed adult children in his paintings is simply not my favorite personality in the art world, but I think I've come to grips with the work itself. That is an accomplishment for me, personally, albeit the paintings of Lucian Freud have commanded some of the highest prices in modern art history.
The book is heavily annotated but somehow doesn't read like a research paper. Many of the insights are actually author Phoebe Hoban's and she gives other thinkers and analysts credits when credits are due. When I went back to look at the paintings again, I noticed many of her personal explanations and descriptions and could finally see something amazing, if not "beautiful," in the startling and disconcerting paintings.
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