Artist: Lucian Freud, born in Berlin in 1922. His parents left for Britain in 1933 and Freud became a British citizen in 1939. He is unique as a 20th-century painter in his dedication to the portrait he has expanded the portrait's territory from faces to naked knees, nipples, feet and genitals.
Freud has no living rivals as a painter of portraits.
Subject: Leigh Bowery (1961- 94), a man of gargantuan scale physically and culturally, a transvestite performance artist, fetishist designer, leader of the band Minty and theatrical giver of birth.
Distinguishing features: Bowery is a character out of Renaissance art - perhaps Silenus, the companion of Dionysus. His flesh is a magnificent ruin, at once damaged and riotously alive. Who knew skin was so particoloured? To count the hues of even one of his feet is impossible: purple, grey, yellow, brown, the paint creamy, calloused, bulging. In a velvet chair tilted down towards us on the raked stage of the wooden studio floor, his mass looms up and dwarfs us. Walk close your eyes are probably the height of his penis. Bowery's violet-domed, wrinkly tube hangs between thighs marked with sinister spots or cuts his knees are massive. Bowery is a painted monument who quietly contemplates his existence inside this flesh.
This is the first portrait in a series that Freud began after seeing the performer strut his stuff at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery in 1988. Bowery regularly appeared on high heels, wearing latex body stockings and masks his vocals for his art band Minty were mainly orgiastic screams over rasping feedback. "I found him perfectly beautiful," Freud said when Bowery came to his studio and posed nude. What was planned as one portrait became a sequence. Bowery's presence in the studio is another performance, a self-revealing act of theatre. Bowery was a man who liked to wear disguises - a masked reveller, here unmasked. Freud is sometimes accused of sadism toward his models. But Bowery was a subject able to answer back, someone with enough charisma and courage to face the artist's inquiry head on.
Some of the paintings in this series are named for Leigh Bowery others are called more impersonal things such as Naked Man, Back View (1991-92). That painting treats Bowery as sublime spectacle: his body's hugeness is examined in a decoratively grotesque way.
This painting, by contrast, is noble, lyrical and loving. There's a comedy to the squareness of Bowery's torso and the sagging second face of his nipples and belly. But look at the grace of his left hand draped over the chair, the colossal scale of his feet. Those are a Roman emperor's feet. After a career of more than half a century, Freud can legitimate be compared to the supreme masters of the portrait, even to Rembrandt and Velazquez.
Inspirations and influences: The ambition of Freud's portraiture demands comparison with the Old Masters. Freud has even done a series of self-portraits over the years, charting his progress from handsome young man to naked old artist waving his brush like a weapon in Painter Working, Reflection (1993). Where Rembrandt painted people in elaborate costumes, Freud is a painter of nakedness his antecedents are the great French painters of the body - Gericault, Courbet, Manet and Degas. This monumental portrait most of all evokes the grand political portraits of Jacques Louis David.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2000/nov/18/art
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