Lucian Freud Outfoxed

The camera didn’t lie.

Lucian Freud was not terminally ill. He didn’t know he’d be dead this winter when he was working hard on the exhibition that has recently opened. But Freud who died last summer, aged 88, surely had death on his mind or to be more focused, the posthumous fate of his reputation as an artist. Often reputations and prices nose dive when a painter dies. It isn’t hard to imagine the desire to avoid this pushed Lucian Freud to spend four years collaborating with London’s National Portrait Gallery on the major retrospective of his portraits now on view there. A big show of his drawings is at Blaine/Southern and goes on to Freud’s Acquavella, his New York dealer. A highly scented fog of myth making accompanies all this. There is much talk of Freud’s genius, charm, wit, gambling, fecundity (14 children by “official” count) and unless he kept a sex diary, countless love affairs or anyway seductions. Besides all this there is the show of late photographs of the artist mostly in his studio taken by David Dawson his long time studio assistant and model. (Dawson was so devoted wags call him “Dave the Slave”.) These show the genius at work and play. Some have a sort of glamour about them—in one Lucian Freud and Kate Moss are cuddling, fully dressed.  This is the third and last in Dawson’s series of Freud images. The other two sold out. This one, nine good size color, limited edition prints are £9000 per portfolio and are selling fast. They offer the onlooker the illusion of being somehow an insider. The image of Lucian Freud sitting in a chair holding a young fox does nothing of the kind. It is by far the most powerful in the series; the most memorable, the most disturbing and the most revealing. I asked David Dawson how it came to be made. This was his reply.

    Freud had been working on his painting “Grey Gelding” in a studio near a convent in Wormwood Scrubs. The nuns there came upon a dying fox cub in the grounds of their convent. He finished the painting and left. The nuns took the fox in and nursed it. It recovered and before they returned it to the woods, Lucian Freud and David Dawson went back to Wormwood Scrubs to meet it.

   It is a sweet tale. There is no reason to doubt it is true. It just ducks the main and clearly unintended story the photograph tells. This is a portrait of a man who is not there. Oh Lucian Freud is physically present…this isn’t the photo of a stand in. What is missing is his mind. "Lucian Freud with a Fox Cub" is the most unnerving photograph of senility I have ever seen.

   In his last years Freud was not gaga. His late paintings are not the wild mishmash of late DeKooning. His short term memory was shot. That has no place in all the stories being told about him. It isn’t that I think it should. What I think is this photograph tells that story forcefully. It deserves to be seen for what it is. This too was part of Lucian Freud’s life as it is or will be for millions of others. He went on painting nearly to the end. He was not destroyed but neither was always there.

For more of my thoughts on Lucian Freud see my Economist article "Lucian Freud in London: Local Hero," published on February 9, 2012