Lucian Freud

Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London
Richard Salmon Ltd., London
Acquired by the present owner in 1992

 

London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Lucian Freud - Recent Paintings, October - November 1972, cat. no. 2, illustrated

Epitomizing the painterly confidence and technical mastery of Lucian Freud’s maturing artistic practice, Head of a Man is a penetrating and psychologically compelling portrait which exquisitely documents the evolution in Freud’s style that occurred in the 1960s. The early years of the decade were a period of huge formative significance for Freud, a time when he discovered fresh European influences which radically inflected his brushwork, palette and composition. Moving away from the precise, Ingriste linear flatness of his earlier portraits to explore the expressive, sculptural properties of paint, it was in these years that the artist honed his trademark mature style of vigorous, gutsy realism. This change in style was attended by a change in instrument, substituting the pliancy of the fine sable brush for the springy bristles of a hog-hair brush. While the former had followed forms with obedient literalness and precision, the new implement left the traces of his brushwork exposed, emphasizing the overt physicality of the paint and laying bare the history of the painting’s evolution.

In the highly material manner in which Freud has painted the face in Head of a Man, Freud’s fluency with the hog-hair brush is abundantly clear. In this assured portrait every movement and facial detail has been painstakingly rendered by expressive marks which model the sitter’s features to produce an intimate vibrant image that glows with physical and psychological insight. The sharply deft accents of colour manifest living flesh with gestural ease, replacing the flatness of the picture surface that was the hallmark of his earlier style with a topographical account of the sitter’s expressive visage. In the present work, Freud uses his brush like a sculptor, emphasizing the three-dimensionality of the painting and endowing it with a distinct character and space of its own.

Importantly, Freud’s decision to change brushes followed several trips to Europe in the summer of 1962 to see specific paintings. During this time, Freud was influenced by the robust energy of Frans Hals’ painterly brushwork, the bold physicality of Théodore Géricault’s paint handling and the shameless fleshiness of Gustave Courbet’s realism. Thinking about Hals and Courbet attuned him to the elastic vigour of form and the effects he could gain from using stiff bristles, while from Géricault he derived an intensity of psychological focus that reached its apogee in the earlier artist’s portraits of the insane. Freud’s admiration for Cézanne can also be discerned in the construction of the face, particularly the chin, where Freud creates angular planes by changing the direction of the brushstroke or by placing one brushstroke at right-angle to another. This lends the form real solidity, describing the hollows and curves of the face just as Paul Cézanne’s brush described those of the Mont Saint-Victoire and causing the chin to jut forward from the picture plane. While his canvases are boldly brushed, Freud’s hand and eye are nonetheless acutely responsive and perceptive, vividly capturing the muscles and tendons beneath the skin.

Universally acknowledged as the greatest living realist painter and Britain’s leading contemporary artist, Freud is famous for the probing psychological scrutiny of his portraiture which has the rare ability to combine external likeness with internal character.  An awareness of his subjects’ distinct private histories leads the artist to his carefully selected - albeit eclectic - group of sitters who are always selected from among family and friends. While Freud never explores these stories in the conventional narrative sense, his unglamorous representations of reality record their presence in the sitters’ features. “I paint people not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be” (Lucian Freud cited in Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Lucian Freud, 2000, p. 35).

Like the most accomplished portraits by the artist, Head of a Man exposes the balance of asymmetries in which personality, emotion and private history recreate themselves before our eyes. With minimal attributes at his disposal, Freud nonetheless concisely conveys the sitter’s character and state of mind. Despite the closely cropped confines of the canvas, Head of a Man captures a poignancy of pose which is awkward and informal, contrived and relaxed. Not quite centered, the deliberate slight imbalance of the composition – a recurrent device in Freud’s painting – creates a hint of anxiety. The cushion behind the sitter’s head is at once comforting yet does not appear to support the weight of the sitter’s heavy-set features.  The pose, with chin slightly raised and looking up at the artist, is reminiscent of many of Frank Auerbach’s best portraits of J.Y.M, with the curve of the cushion echoing the form of the high-backed chair that plays such a pivotal compositional role in dwarfing Auerbach’s sitters. In Head of a Man, the sitter’s accoutrements reinforce the sense of unease: most strikingly his tie has been removed, however without undoing the top button of his starched city collar whose down-turned tips belie a long day’s work. Neither smart nor casual, the sitter is left with all the discomfort of formality without any of its elegance or grace. The dryly painted, pale blue tonality of the shirt exquisitely accentuates the cooler hues of the sitter’s ashen complexion whose jaded jowls belie the weariness of age and whose forehead, with prominent brow, denotes strength of character and intelligence.

Much of the success of Head of a Man, unambiguously a painting borne of the cold impartiality and unswerving scrutiny of the artist’s infamously concentrated gaze, resides in the intensity of the dialogue between painter and sitter. In the present work, the sitter’s unabashed outward gaze engages with the viewer directly, entreating us to share in this privileged dialogue.