“Drawing is much more to an artist than just another medium,” said Mark Hudson in The Independent. For painters in particular, it’s a means of evolving ideas long before brush touches canvas; and, in some cases, like Lucian Freud’s, it’s an abiding obsession. The artist (1922-2011) was “almost pathologically preoccupied with the act of drawing”, producing thousands of etchings and pictures in pencil or charcoal across the breadth of his long career.
This exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is an exhaustive trawl through Freud’s life in drawings, featuring everything from childhood doodles to pictures executed in his final years – and exploring their relationship to his portraiture. It’s “full of great things”: sketchbooks, etchings, and portraits of sitters, family and friends; preparatory sketches, and several of the paintings for which they were created. Whether intended for public display or merely as references for the artist’s eyes alone, the works here add up to a “fascinating and essential” portrait of one of our most celebrated modern artists.
There are “bursts of true excitement” here, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Freud’s portraits of his many lovers make for the “most gripping” section of the show. The “key players of his early love life”, Kitty Garman and Caroline Blackwood, figure so heavily that they are treated to “shows within a show”. Shown alongside photos of these women, Freud’s pictures bear little resemblance to their real-life subjects. “If you look at photos of Garman, she is unrecognisable from the human feline fantasised by Freud.” A painting of Blackwood sees her cowering in a hotel bed, as a “creepy” Freud himself looks on.
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Elsewhere, however, the show is decidedly patchy. Too many key pictures are missing, and the few paintings here are much more interesting than the drawings. There are drawings of monkeys and thistles included that the curators describe as “portraits”; they are certainly not.
It hardly matters, said Jackie Wullschläger in the Financial Times, when the show is so “original and full of rare things”. We get a real sense of Freud’s “instinct for the essential, the indelicate, the confrontational, his intensification of the real”. His early work is characterised by “a mournful, crystalline exactitude” that led one critic to describe him as “the Ingres of existentialism”; his subjects mostly look “terrified”. Less so Francis Bacon, pictured in 1951 – “sexually aggressive in crayon and chalk”, his shirt and trousers undone. Better still is a magnificent 2002 oil portrait of David Hockney, peering over his glasses to return Freud’s scrutiny.
His depictions of the young are often cruel but his treatment of old age can be “heartbreaking”: witness a marvellous 1975 portrait of his mother reading. This is a superb exhibition, one that reveals Freud’s draughtsmanship to be on a par with that of the Old Masters. Don’t miss it.
National Portrait Gallery, London WC2. Until 4 May
