Lucian Freud at Louisiana: Portraits Without Flattery

It’s hard to look at Lucian Freud’s portraits without also thinking about all the images we produce of our own faces. Not because Freud had anything to say about Instagram, face filters or the camera on an iPhone. Of course he didn’t. But because his images hit something that has become even more visible since his death: our expectation that a portrait should do us a favour.

It should choose the good side. Hide the tiredness. Give the skin a little peace. Lift what can be lifted and crop away the rest. Today, a portrait is not just an image of a person. It is often a small negotiation with reality.

Freud refused that service.

Louisiana’s summer exhibition Lucian Freud – Everything Is a Portrait gathers works from his youth in the 1930s through to the beginning of this century. The exhibition, made in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery in London, places particular emphasis on his drawings: pencil, pen, ink, charcoal and etching shown alongside selected paintings.

At first glance, it sounds like a fairly classic art-historical exercise. See how the line developed. See how drawing speaks to painting. But that is also where the exhibition becomes more interesting than its technique.

Because Freud’s line is not neutral. It insists.

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The faces are allowed to be heavy. The skin gets texture. A hand can take up almost absurd amounts of space. The body is not reduced to the version of itself that fits best into a social setting. It remains a body.

It’s tempting to call that honesty. But “honest” is a dangerous word when we talk about portraits. A painting is not an X-ray of truth. It is still one person’s gaze at another human being. And with Freud, it was an extremely persistent gaze.

That is exactly why the images can feel both liberating and unsettling.

On the one hand, the models are freed from the duty to flatter. They do not have to be pleasing. They do not have to smile at us or account for whether the skin looks fresh. There is something almost liberating about seeing a face allowed to be old, swollen, closed or tired without immediately being treated as a problem to be solved.

On the other hand, it is still the artist who decides. He chooses what to hold on to, how long he wants to look, and when the image is finished. Being freed from the demand to be beautiful is not the same as being freed from being looked at.

That tension is far more interesting than the idea of Freud as some kind of brutal truth machine.

His practice changed significantly over the course of his life. The precise, linear drawings of the 1940s were replaced in the 1950s by a looser approach to painting. Later he returned to drawing, and in 1982 he resumed etching after decades away from it. It is a development that makes the exhibition more than a parade of famous faces. You see an artist continuing to search for ways of seeing.

And perhaps that is exactly what makes Freud relevant now.

Not because his images can be used as a moral lecture for a generation with a front-facing camera. That would be far too easy. Nor should we fool ourselves into thinking that a raw portrait is automatically truer than a flattering photograph. Both are choices.

But Freud makes the choice visible.

He reminds us how strange it is, really, that we have become so used to the idea that an image of a person should improve the person. That the camera is expected to be kind. That the skin should apologise for its years, and the body for its weight.

Maybe that is why his portraits can still be a little irritating. They do not give us the politeness we have grown accustomed to. They do not say: Don’t worry, you look good.

They stay put.

And so does the body.