Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting
London’s art world seems convinced that it’ll implode if there isn’t a major exhibition of Lucian Freud’s works every couple of years. Following his Self Portraits show at the Royal Academy in 2019 and then New Perspectives at the National Gallery in 2022, the most recent fix comes from the National Portrait Gallery. Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting focuses on an often-overlooked aspect of the celebrated painter’s oeuvre; his works on paper. Many artists liken drawing to thinking – you may not like everything you see when you’re allowed into their thoughts.
Canvas and paper, because of their varying absorbency and materiality, require wildly different approaches. Compared to the grand monuments of Freud’s paintings, his drawings are delicate and vulnerable, which is why he largely made them as preparatory sketches or to keep a visual diary. Certain marks and motifs would be experimented with on paper before they ended up on canvas. And while he pushed the boundaries of how to represent the human form, not every experiment produced interesting results, so to base an entire exhibition around such drawings is certainly an interesting choice.
Where the show really succeeds is in its curation, fostering a dialogue between Freud’s drawings and paintings. When they’re hung side by side – the figures in his drawings isolated from the painting – you really appreciate his keen observation of the body reflected in every determined line. You can see how the density of shading in...
