At home one evening in 1951, Lucian Freud did three drawings of fellow artist Francis Bacon. The biographer William Feaver recounts the anecdote as Freud told it to him: Bacon had stood up, undone the buttons on his trousers, rolled up his sleeves and wiggled his hips a little, saying: “I think you ought to do this, because I think that’s rather important.”
By Freud’s own admission, the older painter was provocative in more ways than just this pose: “I got very impatient with the way I was working. It was limited and a limited vehicle for me,” Freud told Feaver. He felt his drawing stopped him from freeing himself, he said, “and I think my admiration for Francis came into this. I realised that by working in the way I did I couldn’t really evolve. The change wasn’t perhaps more than one of focus, but it did make it possible for me to approach the whole thing in another way.”
Trace with your eye the curves and precision of those three line drawings and “limited” is the very last adjective that springs to mind. They are magnificent. What Freud’s comments belie is the tireless striving that lends all his work such power.
This trio are among the 175 paintings and works on paper at the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting. Drawing, for Freud, was many things. It was how he wrote letters as a kid, how he broke in canvases (a rough ghostly image that would disappear under the paint), solved problems (going to the National Gallery late at night to look at specific works), and painted without paint (all those meaty etchings from the 1980s onwards). It was also often what he did after he had, as his former assistant David Dawson puts it, “painted himself out of a painting”. Curator Sarah Howgate points to several pen-and-inks and charcoals on paper that relate to Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau), that monumental canvas he did between 1981 and 1983. Many of the drawings, Howgate says, “were a response to the finished painting; they weren’t preparatory workings out”.
Dawson, who worked for Freud from the early 1990s and is the last person of whom he made a portrait, says that drawing after the fact was about the artist’s unending quest for a direct line from the heart to the eye to the hand to the canvas: “He’s finding things out, he’s exploring, and it’s a quicker route to explore with a pencil or charcoal than the whole oil spectrum.”
It is also the most exacting. “He always said you can never lie with drawing,” says Dawson. “Whereas with paint, it’s such an attractive medium, you can slightly smudge things, if you cut corners – which he never did, but you can. You can fake it a bit with paint. You can’t with drawing.”
Lucian Freud: Drawing Into Painting is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, to 4 May.
Pencilled in: five images from the exhibition
Portrait of a Young Man, 1944 (main picture)
Howgate highlights the directness of artist John Craxton’s gaze here, and the incredible detail in Freud’s rendering of the man’s hair, the weave of his jacket, the soft folds of his cravat. His use of white chalk on coloured paper recalls Ingres, and art historian Herbert Read’s assessment of Freud as “the Ingres of existentialism”
Bella in her Pluto T-Shirt, 1995
An earlier version of this portrait of Bella Freud shows the artist’s daughter without a face. Freud’s etchings variously record moments when he made a mark then changed his mind, or, as here, when he got the printmaker to rub the copper plate back down to smooth so he could rework whatever he wasn’t happy with..
Girl in Bed, 1952
With some artists, says Howgate, “all their portraits of other people are actually portraits of themselves. I think that’s less the case with Lucian.” Freud spoke often of his subject’s inner life being important. They weren’t just blanks for him to fill in. Instead, he made their private universes tangible.
Solicitor’s Head, 2003
Freud would work standing less than a metre from where his subject was variously lying on the bed, or on the floor, or seated on a chair, and, says Dawson, “he’d come up really close to you, like, really close”. If his process was very internalised, you were aware of his nervous anxiety. “It wasn’t relaxed. And that kept you as a sitter slightly on edge because he didn’t quite know … He was battling with himself every day.”
David Hockney, 2002
Included in the exhibition are a selection of paintings that show the dialogue between Freud’s works on paper and on canvas. For this portrait, Hockney would walk through Holland Park to see Freud and sit “for 120 hours, as he loves to say,” says Howgate. He did a drawing of Freud, too, which is also in the National Portrait Gallery collection, but, as Dawson puts it, Freud only gave David 45 minutes “and then walked out”.