Lucian Freud: New Perspectives – a magnificent display of painterly flair

This year marks the centenary of Lucian Freud’s birth – and London’s galleries aren’t about to let us forget it, said Laura Freeman in The Times. This autumn, “you can’t move for Freud books and shows”.

Exhibitions devoted to the painter, who died in 2011, are taking place at the Freud Museum, the Garden Museum and at no less than four commercial galleries; meanwhile, a collection of the artist’s letters and a “massive” coffee-table book are being published. Yet any feelings of Freud fatigue will be dispelled by this “stunning show” at the National Gallery, which effortlessly demonstrates why we so venerate this most difficult but “brilliant” of painters.

Entitled New Perspectives, the exhibition brings together more than 60 paintings created over the course of Freud’s seven-decade career in an attempt to examine his work afresh; it aims to disregard his complicated private life to focus on the art itself. Taking us from his “peculiar” and borderline “surreal” early works, to the “forensic and unforgiving” portraits he would come to specialise in later in life, it is a magnificent display of painterly flair that celebrates Freud’s “incomparable eye”.

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Freud at his ‘most stark’

There are some fabulous pictures here, said Ben Luke in the London Evening Standard. The “deeply strange” Girl with a Kitten (1947) sees the titular cat “on the brink of having its neck wrung”, yet unlike the girl holding it, the cat meets our gaze “with a knowing calm”. In a 1946 painting, Freud depicts himself looking out from behind a thistle that resembles “an instrument of torture”. Better still is And the Bridegroom (1993), in which the performance artist Leigh Bowery lies naked on a bed next to his wife, Nicola. It represents Freud at his “most stark”, and is all the better for it.

Ultimately, though, displaying him among the masterpieces of the National Gallery’s collection confirms my doubts: the truth is that Freud was “not a genius, not even a great artist”. The show is within spitting distance of Titian and Rembrandt, among the artists Freud most “revered”. In this context, many of his paintings appear “racked” with “uncertainty and doubt”, as if he were self-consciously intent on matching his artistic forebears. Ultimately, Freud was an “uneven painter – occasionally wonderful, often very ordinary”.

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Works ‘simply aren’t up to scratch’

Many works here “simply aren’t up to scratch”, agreed Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. A 2005 portrait of New York art dealer William Acquavella is “astonishingly ho-hum”, while Freud’s likeness of his fellow artist David Hockney, depicted with “thinning hair” and a double chin, sees its subject “blanched of vitality and flair”. His controversial portrait of the Queen, meanwhile, makes her look positively “masculine”.

Nevertheless, the gallery’s showcasing of the artist’s marvellous earlier work almost makes up for the misfires. The younger Freud approaches his sitters like “a pathologist performing an autopsy”. Sometimes, he quite literally paints carcasses: here, we see both “a cockerel’s decapitated head” and “an upside-down dead heron”.

Hotel Bedroom (1954) depicts his second wife Caroline Blackwood lying on a bed, “stiff as an effigy in a church tomb”. From the shadows, Freud himself stares down at her impassively. It is one of several “unforgettable” works here: a reminder that for a time at least, Freud really was an “inordinately exciting” painter.

National Gallery, London WC2. Until 22 January 2023