Word: freude
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Ruskin would not, however, have approved of Freud's nudes, any more than some feminists do today. These figures, splayed under the inquisitorial electric light and the downward gaze of the artist, are the mainstay of his work, and the fierceness with which they reject the softening conventions of the "studio nude" has provoked a bumper crop of balderdash about Freud's supposed misogyny and sexism. (Freud's own riposte, in a recent interview, was terse: "I think the idea of misogyny is a stimulant to feminists, and it's rather like anti-Semites looking for Jewish noses everywhere...
...hardly not know -- given the amount of gossip that has lately dropped on Freud's closely guarded personal life -- that all the models are people with some specific relation to the artist as friends, lovers, daughters. But the nature of that relationship doesn't appear in the painting, and everyone is treated with the same relentless scrutiny of physical fact, so that a chin or an elbow acquires the same intensity, as painting, as a breast or a pubic mound. The results have much to do with modeling -- physical manipulation, as though the body were being reconstructed in the medium...
Since the late '80s, Freud's work has become more audacious in its ability to deal with extremes of physical presence without sliding into caricature. In part this is due to his finding a new model in the form of Leigh Bowery, a huge, soft, hairless, child-faced, pierced-cheeked performance artist who might, in earlier days, have modeled Bacchuses for Rubens. Freud's paintings of this man-mountain are done in a spirit not far from amazement: his + excitement in traversing Bowery's back in Naked Man, Back View, 1991-92, is so palpable that you'd think...
Life or art? Both. Freud insists that he always lets his sitters take their own natural poses, rather than setting them up -- as well they might, given the arduous business of being painted for 80 sittings or more under the glare of the 200-watt bulbs in his studio. But whether by accident or design, flashbacks to past art do crop up regularly...
...like Courbet's lesbians, without the Second Empire titillation. A naked man on his back, one leg up and a sock dangling from the other foot, penis flopping askew, turns out to echo closely the pose of that Hellenistic image of postbacchanalian fatigue, the Barberini Faun. And so on. Freud doesn't quote ostentatiously, but he is an artist with a full memory -- as any serious painter must be. There is no level on which he could be accused of having an "innocent...