A BODY OF PAINT
LUCIAN FREUD, NAKED MAN, BACK VIEW, 1991-92
(Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
This is what it all comes down to: a naked man sitting on a low stool in a studio, posing for a painter. More than a century after Courbet and Manet fired their salvos at the bloodless idealization of the Salon nude, eighty years after Picasso radically re-engineered the human body, forty years after Pollock showed us that a painting was painting and nothing else, we find ourselves in a gallery at the Met staring intently at a fat guy’s back. The guy in question is London performance artist Leigh Bowery, and Lucian Freud titled the work Naked Man, Back View. Naked, not nude, for there can be no question of idealization now. Freud has deliberately chosen a model outside the canon of male beauty, a body on which the strong, decisive outlines of the classical nude are lost in sinuous curves of flesh and rolls of fat. Looking at the painting, one remembers what the Lilliputians called Gulliver: the "Man-Mountain." Bowery’s back is a geological outcropping of flesh. It’s a landscape of unexpected hills and valleys, and we traverse it with our eyes like wanderers in a foreign country. John Donne’s erotic apostrophe to his lover ("O my America! my new-found land...") is given a surprising homosexual twist. We have rarely, if ever, seen a body like Bowery’s in Western art before. One wonders what the Salon-goers who considered Courbet vulgar would have made of this.
Nonetheless, there is a sort of closing of the circle here, a sense that art history’s trajectory through Realism, Impressionism, Modernism and abstraction has spiraled back to a new kind of figuration, that modern art has returned to its source in the realistic depiction of living human beings. Indeed, for at least a few minutes while painting this work, Lucian Freud was Gustave Courbet. A photograph taken in Freud’s studio shows the artist and Bowery posing around the unfinished Naked Man in the attitudes of Courbet and his female model in Courbet’s enormous The Artist’s Studio. Bowery wears an expression of campy ecstasy while Freud/Courbet appears to insert his brush into the crack of the painted Bowery’s ass. It’s a multi-level inside joke, artist and model clowning for the camera, and we probably shouldn’t make too much of it. There is, however, one minor detail in the photograph that does aid our understanding of the finished work. The stool on which Bowery sits turns out to be no stool at all, but a chair with a slightly reclining back. Part of this chairback was originally visible in the painting over Bowery’s right shoulder, but at some point Freud decided to paint it away, and it now exists only as a shadowy, barely noticeable pentimento on the background curtain. Why did Freud say ‘Abracadabra’ and with a few waves if his paintbrush make the chairback disappear? Probably because it was in his way. It was a strong, flat, vertical element that blocked the painting’s movement into depth, and this diagonal movement is too important to the meaning of the work to be compromised by an inconvenient piece of furniture.
All of the painting’s major elements are arranged generally along a diagonal moving from lower left to upper right. Bowery’s left arm and thigh run in this direction, parallel to the crease in the carpet. The riser and stool are tilted so as to lead the eye upward and to the right. Bowery’s crouching torso and head lean in the same direction. Even the strongest vertical accent to the right of his body, the edge of the background curtain, is softened with a wavering contour and crossed at the top by a diagonal fold. All of these diagonals draw our gaze toward the top right corner and to a rectangular patch of random brushstrokes where the artist has wiped and flicked excess paint onto the studio wall. This rectangle–larger than Bowery’s head–is the essence of the painting. Indeed, it is the essence of painting. Colored pigments thickly encrusted on a flat surface without a hint of representational intent, this is a ‘purer’ abstraction than most of Pollock’s works. This seemingly random patch of wall is the raw material of painting in its rawest form, and by so carefully drawing our attention to it, Freud tells us that this, the material essence, is the point of it all.
This revelation of the painter’s materials is a kind of realism that goes far beyond Courbet and reflects a century’s worth of paradigm shifts in the very meaning of the word ‘realism.’ The mid-nineteenth century saw Realism in contrast to Romantic idealism, and Courbet’s massive Burial at Ornans, with its ordinary provincial villagers portrayed on the scale of Romantic heroes and Imperial conquerors, was its manifesto-painting. A generation later, Monet, Pissarro and the other Impressionists moved the concept of realism inward to focus less on the careful delineation of objects and more on transcribing the artist’s sensory impressions of color, light and form. With Expressionism this inward movement continued, producing works that were ‘realistic’ reflections of psychological and emotional truth but were often far from optical reality. At the same time, Cubism explored a new kind of pictorial space, breaking up forms and flattening objects against the picture plane to create a type of representation more truthful than the perspective illusions of traditional art. Later, the New York abstractionists, with a near-fanatical doctrine of truth to materials, dripped, threw, poured, sprayed and stained their paintings on canvas. This was ‘reality’: the shape, the color, the texture of the materials–and nothing more. But of course there is something more. In art, there’s always more. Abstraction’s purified pools of color were quickly overwhelmed by the return of figuration in Pop and Photorealist art. The body (and the rest of the world) was back, but with a difference. After Pollock, painters could not forget the material basis of their art and return to an old illusionistic style. Instead, it was necessary to combine the New York School’s concept of ‘realism’ with that of a century before, to paint as Courbet would have painted had he lived after Pollock. Naked Man, Back View is a near-perfect example of post-abstract figure painting, eminently conscious of materials and true to the reality of flesh and fabric. This is painting after Pollock, cognizant of his achievement but hardly reverent. That rectangle of paint on the wall is not an homage but a riposte to abstraction. It’s as if Freud is saying: Yes, the materials are the essence, but the art is what you do with them.
Freud does wonderful things, from the ‘random’ abstraction on the wall to the subtly modulated Manet-like grays of the curtain and cushion. But the center of attention is Bowery’s body. In contrast to the smooth texture of the upholstered stool, the body receives Freud’s thickest and roughest impasto. When the canvas is viewed from the side, Bowery’s ear rises from the surface, the paint so thick we want to call it low relief. Freud has said, "I want paint to work as flesh... As far as I’m concerned the paint is the person."1 All over the body, Freud attempts to transmute paint into flesh, whipping it up into boils and blisters, varying the tone and color to create the illusion of mounds and curves and rolls. The application is forbidding, almost brutal, as if Freud is daring us to see this paint as flesh, this flesh as paint. This is painting as topography; the back is a rolling, sunlit landscape bisected by the spine’s shadowed valley. And at the end of that valley, two rolls of flesh curve around Bowery’s hips and meet to form a small vertical slit at the top of his ass. The slit suggests female genitalia and reminds us of Bowery’s public persona as a gender-bending performance artist. In his drive to describe and transmute, Freud leaves no crevice unexplored, no pimple undelineated.
When presented with an image this original, the first reaction of art historians is to seek a precedent in the past. At its best, this kind of criticism illuminates a work through association; at its worst, it grasps at vague similarities and attempts to reduce all art to the state of postmodern pastiche. The Great Precedent Hunt sparked by Naked Man, Back View has bagged everything from the Belvedere Torso to Ingres’s Valpincon Bather to the back studies of Freud’s friend Francis Bacon. Presumably, if it’s a work of art painted before 1991 and it shows a back, it’s fair game. One critic has even compared Bowery (but not this specific painting) to the fat circus strongman in Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques. What does any of this tell us about the painting itself? Precious little. When I look at this work, I see something that has no important relationship to Ingres or classical sculpture or Francis Bacon. I see that great mass of back as a carapace, a giant tortoise’s shell with the head and limbs poking out. It’s a protective covering, fat as armor against life’s everyday cruelties. But this pathos, this sense of Bowery crouching under a shell, is contradicted by the massive, powerful leg that protrudes at a strong diagonal and is emphasized by a wide swath of light flesh tone painted from hip to knee. There is great potential energy in this leg, enough to lift the massive body and propel it forward into the studio space. In fact, in the context of the work’s other diagonals, the leg’s position suggests the bent leg of the ‘heroic diagonal’ pose identified by Kenneth Clark in The Nude as representing energy and forward motion. But let’s not get carried away. The bend in Bowery’s leg is more extreme than Clark’s examples, the body heavier, the energy required greater, and the other leg hidden from view. If Freud does intend an ancient reference, it’s to a broken statue, an impressive but fragmented Hercules with one leg missing and both arms broken off (so maybe those critics who cite the Belvedere Torso aren’t far from the mark). The ancient torso remains impressive, but like real bodies under the tyranny of time, it is diminished and we can have only intimations of its former power.
In the end, however, Bowery signifies nothing but himself, a fat man in a studio. This is an extremely materialistic painting, focused on the truth of bodies, flesh and paint because there are no other truths, no reality beyond the material world. The fact that Bowery is posing–and the fact that he was a well-known performance artist–might lead us to think about personality as performance, a constant playing of social roles, but any such Existential speculations based upon this painting are destined to collide with a solid wall of flesh. The reality of the body is so obvious and exaggerated here that it even weighs down our thoughts about the meaning of the work. It keeps us grounded (not necessarily a bad thing). In a way similar to Picasso’s most abstract Cubist canvases and Pollock’s drip paintings, Naked Man always takes us back to material reality, back to the surface, to the paint that for Freud is flesh. In an intellectual climate that tends to see reality as an ideological construction and human beings as intersections of discourse, Freud insists on our corporeality, the centrality of our bodies to our being. We can play a thousand roles in a lifetime, but this body will always be our burden to bear. This is the truth of the painting–and its triumph. Freud shows us the flesh that cannot be ignored.