Lucian Freud

Acacia is one of a rare group of highly important paintings of the urban landscape that Lucian Freud executed during the 1970s. Devoid of his usual subject matter, the human figure, these intensely observed portraits of the diverse London landscape are striking for their seeming arbitrariness. However it is this very impression of objective distance that Freud renders with such a painstaking attention to the smallest and seemingly unremarkable detail that makes these works so powerful and unforgettable. This is a gritty urban realism of the highest degree, a form of realism that like the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) of the 1920s unsettles the observer with the acute accuracy of its vision. Peppered with stumps, cracks, trimmed branches and dead wood all as eloquent as Freud’s human tissue, the present work is no idealised nature study. His urban paintings importantly mark a period of transition and reflection in the artist’s work following the death of his father in 1970. As he recalled in 2000, “The subject matter of my paintings has always been dictated by the way my life has gone, and I noticed that when I was under particular strain, I didn’t feel like staring at people or bodies all day.” (Lucian Freud quoted in William Feaver, ‘Seeing through the Skin’ The Guardian, 18 May 2002).

Executed in 1975, the opulence of the verdant, open expanse of the present work is set in contrast with Freud’s cluttered and claustrophobic ‘Wasteground’ pictures (see Fig. 2). Standing as naked as one of the artist’s life studies, Acacia’s knotted trunk ripples like a flexing arm as its tentacle-like branches snake out across the canvas. Complementing his human studies in its inherent vagaries of form and detail, nature and the urban landscape feed Freud’s inquisitive eye and enliven his masterful draughtsmanship. These rare and intricate compositions reveal a glimpse of the artist at his most private, removed from the constant studio visits incurred by his portraits.

Freud’s fascination with botanical as well as human subjects first appeared in some of his earliest drawings like Gorse Sprig (see Fig. 3), in which the painstaking replication of minute details recalls the work of Albrecht Dürer, an artist whom Freud greatly admired. As these early drawings illustrate, nature’s compositional complexity appealed to his innate visual sensibility and natural draughtsmanship in different ways from his portraits, actively inspiring and challenging Freud’s technical ability. These early botanical studies witness miracles of technical virtuosity, and one of his most famous paintings, 'Interior, Paddington' of 1951 gives us arguably the most memorable potted plant in the whole history of art.

As Freud’s style developed and matured, these tentative and lifeless linear studies were enlivened with the full confidence of his later, more painterly expression, infusing the present work with a fluid spontaneity that conceals its exquisitely studied form. ‘Two Plants’ (see Fig. 1) in the Tate Collection is arguably Freud's most ambitious and complete expression of this theme. Taking him three years to complete and rendered with meticulous precision, Freud described it as “lots of little portraits of leaves”.

The present work shares a similar studied attention to individual forms in the presentation of the whole. Painted from a second floor flat on Alma Square in St. Johns Wood during the winter of 1975, Acacia combines the asymmetrical feel of a snapshot with the steady precision of Freud’s hand. The surface quivers with an intensity of delicate brushstrokes in the subtle green hues that are dramatically interrupted with fluid linear browns of the wandering branches.  Despite being the result of many hours of careful observation, Freud manages to make it seem alive and spontaneous:  a feeling enhanced by the virgin canvas in the lower left hand corner that seems to recede before the viewer’s eyes under the advancing composition.

This small, untouched corner of white canvas importantly reveals an insight into the artist’s working process. Often when painting a subject, Freud chooses to leave a corner incomplete until the last minute so as to relish the act of completion and watch the image suddenly come alive like placing the final pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Significantly the present work’s ‘in-progress’ nature is not due to abandonment: but is because he was no longer able to paint from the flat at Alma Square. One can sense Freud’s excitement of nearing completion as the brushwork creeps ever closer to the bottom corner. Freud explained to the critic Robert Hughes, “I could never put anything into a picture that wasn’t actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness” and this explains why he chose to leave the bottom corner empty.