Word: freude
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...blotches half- echoing the surface texture of the girl's cloth. The strength of her presence isn't due just to her depicted fatness but to the way the image burgeons from dense paint, a heavy mass like cream with gravel in it. For in his own way Freud has done (in this picture and others) what Velazquez did: assimilate the life of the subject to the life of the paint surface and of each gesture held in it. Very few painters can do this. It is not a trick. This is the difference between painting something and merely rendering...
...Freud's last show in America was at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington in 1987. It didn't go to New York. It wasn't modern enough for the Museum of Modern Art; and at the Met there was a suspicion that, as one of its senior staff remarked, "Lucian can be wonderful one picture at a time, but a row of 20 could be a bit of a bore." Happily, the museum has now changed its tune and hung some 80 Freuds, the earliest done in 1945, the latest finished this year...
...mildly, a bit of a bore. For Freud, despite his quota of failed pictures (failed, however, by standards to which most living artists don't aspire), is the best realist painter alive. To watch the development of his work -- even in the abbreviated form of one show -- is like watching a wily cock salmon compelled upstream by instinct, against the cataracts of modernist history, following its desires. Most of the major stylistic events in art since 1900, starting with late Cezanne and going on through Cubism to abstraction in its various forms, have had no apparent impact on Freud...
...Freud, grandson of Sigmund, was born in Germany in 1922. He grew up in Berlin, but his parents brought him to London in 1939, barely in front of the rising wave of Nazi persecution. In England his schooling was irregular and "progressive" -- even today his handwriting is that of a 10-year-old -- and although he had some art training, he was basically self-taught. Freud's German origins have suggested to some critics that early works like Girl with Roses, 1947-48, a portrait of his first wife, Kitty Garman, daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, were done under...
Then, around 1958, Freud took to using stiffer brushes -- hog hair, not sable -- that forced broader and more pictorially solid shapes into the paint with which he depicted flesh, helping him compose the body's structure in terms of twisting and displacement. This "Freud effect" is not unlike the quick, coarse expressiveness of Frans Hals, but less benign. A broader stroke didn't diminish the closeness of his inspection. If Velazquez had ever chosen to paint water dribbling from a spout, he might have come up with the sort of brilliant fiction about unstable, passing appearances that Freud achieved...