It is one of the exhibitions of the year in Spain or, perhaps, the exhibition. With capital letters. The Thyssen Museum in Madrid has managed to articulate together with the National Gallery in London a powerful retrospective of Lucian Freud, grandson of the father of psychoanalysis and protagonist of a string of personal scandals in life due to his turbulent relationship with his partners, but, above all, one of the greatest painters of the 20th century. And from the XXI: he passed away in 2011 and until the last moment he created masterpieces.
In the exhibition you can see the fabulous Portrait of the greyhound, his last work, painted shortly before his death and in which he places his dog Eli, who, without the hind legs drawn, seems to begin to fade, to disappear, and to his assistant, David Dowson, naked, with a skin that seems to be beginning to peel off, to disintegrate, like paint on an old wall subjected to perpetual humidity. A work about the ravages of time, about clinging to life, but also about the power of paint to create that summarizes the work of a creator who knew how to turn paint into flesh.
"I want the painting to act as if it were meat," he stressed. And he warned that "my idea about the portrait comes from the dissatisfaction I feel for portraits that look like people. I would like my portraits to be of people and not like them." And he summed up his belief: "When I paint my intention is to provoke sensations by offering an intensification of reality."
No one to visit the fifty exceptional works, many from private collections, which are shown at Lucian Freud from this Tuesday until June 18. New perspectives at the Thyssen Museum, you will need to change a comma to your own vision. Focused on the portrait, the self-portrait and the nude, the exhibition covers paintings of his relatives -including his naked daughter Bella-, friends -such as Francis Bacon or his partner, George Dyer, an illiterate ex-criminal whom he portrayed more balanced than he- or powerful people who commissioned paintings from him and he, infrequently, accepted. Like a Rothschild or Baron Thyssen himself, with whom he became friends and even went to clubs and whose seated portrait Francesca Thyssen has announced by surprise during the presentation of the sample that she donates it to the museum -until now it was in storage- after seeing this emotional display on which it hangs.
He also portrayed his bookie - he was crazy about horse racing and paid his losses that way - in the exceptional Two Irishmen in W11, quite a show of power, and, of course, he portrayed his women in powerful and sometimes powerful portraits. devastating as Hotel Room (1954), in which he is standing in a room in front of the couple with whom he has just broken up, a woman who lies in bed under the covers and with her eyes enormously swollen from having cried for a long time ; However, Freud does not look at her, but at the viewer of the painting, showing what he has made of her.
Daniel Herrmann, who has curated the exhibition in London, and Paloma Alarcó, curator at Thyssen, who has curated it in Madrid, wanted to make an exhibition proposal away from the noise of Lucian Freud's life, explains Guillermo Solana, director of the museum : "A sensationalist approach has been used frequently with Freud in which the relationship with his partners and his tormented private life counted above all, and sometimes he paid particular attention to morbid sex rather than to the substance of the painting."
"Herrmann and Alarcó -he continued- have opened our eyes to their painting above all, to the enormous quality of a man who is surely the greatest painter of the last century. And to a human content of another genre, which attends to dignity human and deals with tenderness, not just desire. Above all, in the double portraits, in which, portraying a couple in a bed or a dog sleeping next to a woman, he knows how to capture the nature of the relationships simply through a hand on a leg or the muzzle of the animal on the arm. of his mistress
The exhibition, which evolves from the first more hieratic portraits influenced by the great portrait painters of the German Renaissance towards a material painting, more impasto, and in which he goes from painting seated to doing it standing, surrounding his models, approaching them to see the smallest details to be able to create human beings and not just portraits. Alarcó points out that "all of his work can be considered a meta-artistic reflection of painting" in a man for whom the great masters were key and who was an unrepentant visitor to museums.
If the bet of the exhibition may seem like an elegant way of avoiding the turbulence that causes, as can be seen with Picasso, the tormented relationships of artists with their wives, room after room Freud's painting imposes itself naked until it reaches the dedicated space to his studio, in which the reflection on the power of painting, its ability to construct reality, almost to give shape to the scattered atoms to which we will return, takes over the canvas, as seen in a self-portrait from 2002, in the one that Freud seems to be building himself from paint... or dissolving in it. Or in Large interior W9, in which he brings together two people who never met, his elderly mother Lucie Freud and her lover Jacquetta Eliot, in a painting that contrasts the gazes of two women of opposite ages and in which a container for grind pigments, as if everything came out of it.
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