Lucian Freud paints his subjects in the round, giving us a sense of what is going on beneath the surface, writes Aidan Dunne
Broadly speaking, there are two ways to go about making a drawing of a subject such as a human head or a figure. One is to block out the general proportions of what you are looking at, to map in two dimensions an overall view of the three-dimensional object, and gradually articulate the detail. The other is to locate a point at the centre of the mass, take that as a kind of centre of optical gravity, and work outwards from it. Odds are that Lucian Freud, whose paintings have an unmistakably organic quality, works out from the centre, an impression that seems to be confirmed by the abandoned paintings curator Catherine Lampert has included in the exhibition of his work she selected for the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma), which opens on Wednesday.
The unfinished works feature fragments that are remarkably complete in themselves, beautifully painted, which make one wonder why he quit. We are left with a sense of him as a fiercely attentive, narrowly focused eye, working his way over the subject, which progressively, bit by bit, materialises on the canvas. That is pretty much what he has been doing for decades now, since the late 1970s, mostly in his top-floor studio in Holland Park in London (though he paints at his home as well), a strikingly bare room that forms the backdrop to a surprisingly large number of paintings - surprisingly because Freud is notoriously tardy about finishing his pictures and has, he says, become even slower with age, as a result of being more careful.
He was born in Berlin in 1922. His father, Sigmund Freud's youngest son, wisely quit Germany when the Nazis gained control in 1933. Freud has been based in London more or less ever since and claims to like it more than anywhere else he's ever been. Having attended the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, a particularly relaxed institution, he endured a brief spell as a seaman before embarking on life as a relatively impoverished artist in marginal accommodation around Paddington. He spent short periods in Paris and in Ireland - Dublin and the west - at the start of the 1950s.
His first marriage, to Kitty Garman, in 1948, did not last and it was succeeded by an intense relationship with Caroline Blackwood, who he married in 1953. His initial style of meticulous realism, frequently compared to Early Netherlandish painting, earned him the endorsement of David Sylvester, Sir Kenneth Clark and Herbert Read, who dubbed him "The Ingres of existentialism". But some of this enthusiasm waned when he began to use broader brushes and the surface of his paintings changed completely. Lampert feels that these stylistic shifts can be over-emphasised, and has endeavoured to point up his underlying consistency in her choice of work.
The break-up of his marriage to Blackwood in 1957 was certainly a turning point, though, and it lead to what became his mature, heavily textural style. His daughters Bella and Esther were born of his relationship with Bernardine Coverley, and Suzy Boyt is the mother of Ali, Ib, Rose and Suzy. The complicated chronicle of Freud's personal life has tended to emerge in retrospect. He is legendarily secretive, to the extent that Blackwood once said that being in any way involved with him was like being involved in a conspiracy.
AS LAMPERT'S CHOICE underlines, there are distinct categories of Freudian subject matter, and prominent among them is that of men. While gay men are often painted naked in the pictures, straight men are usually clothed. They are often formidable, middle-aged, and strong, though they can look lost in their own thoughts, wistful and vulnerable, disengaged from their habitual personas, as though they have suddenly been struck by the puzzle of who they are. This is an honest and accurate reflection of the process of sitting. Freud is painstaking, and sitting for him is a long-term commitment.
For him, the act of looking is in itself charged with something like erotic energy, though this is not necessarily related to the subject matter. When Leigh Bowery, one of his most striking models, asked him if he liked there to be "a sexual possibility" in his pictures, he replied: "The paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter - Constable, for example." That is, the important element is the artist's desire, and that desire must be there, as it is with his own nearest approaches to Constable subjects, including his paintings of the tangled, overgrown buddleia in his back garden, works that are fantastically alert and involved.
Several observers have become exercised about the fact that he has painted his grown-up daughters naked, seeing something indecent or suspect about it. A naked model, he has observed, "invokes consideration". And when the model is one of his own children it invokes "a father's consideration as well as a painter's".
There is, though, a specific dimension to many of Freud's paintings of the human figure that sets them apart. From about the mid-1960s, when he embarked on a stunning series of paintings with Penelope Cuthbertson as a model, he has pushed the bounds of decorum in terms of mainstream depictions of the human body considered not as a generic type but as, to use his own term, a "naked portrait". While he rarely identified his sitters, they were unmistakably themselves, not the bland "nudes" of artistic convention. His willingness to focus on anatomical details usually glossed over eventually meant that his dealer actually found it difficult to market his paintings - a recurrent problem throughout a large part of his career, though it seems hard to believe it now - because they were considered unattractive and even ugly.
The patronage of Charles Saatchi was certainly instrumental in broadening his appeal, but there were other landmark events, including the publication of a Thames & Hudson monograph in 1982, a touring retrospective organised by the British Council in 1987 and Lampert's own exhibition of his work, which she organised when she was director of London's Whitechapel Gallery in 1994. The latter was crucial because it established his contemporary relevance, making it quite clear that he was being treated not as an historical figure at all, a member of the old guard of English painting, but as an artist of the current scene, which is all the more remarkable given that the excitement of the Young British Artists phenomenon was in full swing.
Look at the work of Francis Bacon's later years, and there is a real sense that he was struggling, unsuccessfully, with time. They impart an anxiety about the datedness of their style. Freud, on the other hand, has managed to remain of his time entirely on his own terms.
Lampert has a convincing explanation as to how he did this: from the late 1980s, she suggests, he came into contact (largely through his own children) with a younger generation of radically creative people.
Most famously, of course, there is his extraordinary collaboration with performance artist Leigh Bowery, who features in a number of rightly celebrated paintings. Bowery and a number of other sitters present the painter with particular challenges, not so much or only because they are each utterly particular, physically untypical, but because they are each spiky, provocative presences with strong attitudes and talents of their own.
FREUD IS A dogged, preternaturally patient worker, and his claim that he has no particular facility has some credence. But he is skilled, and has accumulated a staggering wealth of experience. Part of his achievement as a painter of horses, dogs or people is that he conveys the shocking particularity, the strangeness, of each body. The late David Sylvester complained that he paints bodies "with the eyes of a pathologist." He had a point, though not quite the right one.
Freud's painted bodies are bundles of flesh and bone, corporeal, startlingly material, but they are very much alive, and their strangeness is the strangeness of life itself, of encountering an animal presence, something that tends to get lost in the general mass of formulaic representation.
Lampert repeatedly emphasises the sculptural quality of Freud's paintings and, especially, his etchings. He is one of the few painters to paint a subject in the round, so to speak. He feels obliged to give us a sense of the back if he is painting the front.
Several commentators have noted his desire to see and depict more and more, to convey not just a surface but to delve beneath the surface: the transparency of an eyelid, the network of veins under the skin of a breast, the skeletal armature with its bulging joints and angles, a sense of the body's internal spaces.
This desire to penetrate internal spaces has sexual connotations, as his many paintings of nudes with exposed labia would suggest. It is startlingly expressed in Irish Woman on a Bed (2003-04), a singular, slightly awkward painting especially notable for two odd props: cherries scattered by the woman's thigh and a bulging pillow with its down spilling out. Both fruit and pillow are surely emblematic of the body, not just this particular body but the human body in general, and its transience.
Of this painting, Freud commented to the critic, Richard Cork: "The pillow looked so perfect that I slashed it with a knife and had the down coming out. The inside of things interests me very much, and I thought I'd find out what goes on inside the pillow, why it was so soft."
Equally, when Bowery asked him if he ever worked from photographs, he said that he did, but only photographs of people with whom he was already familiar, because photographs are "almost entirely to do with light . . . I'm more interested in what's inside their heads".
• Lucian Freud is at the New Galleries and East Ground Galleries of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital Kilmainham, from June 6 to Sept 2. Admission is free. 01-6129900