Volume 34, Number 13 · August 13, 1987
On Lucian Freud
By Robert Hughes
The first painting by a living British artist that I can remember seeing—not just 'noticing'—was by Lucian Freud, hanging in the Tate Gallery more than twenty-five years ago. It was his 1952 portrait of Francis Bacon (see illustration this page). A small picture, about the size of a shorthand note pad, and one whose extreme compression makes it even more compact in memory; I remember it as a miniature. The thought of 'miniature,' with its Gothic overtones, was affirmed by the surface: tight, exact, meticulous, and (most eccentrically when seen in the late Fifties, a time of urgent gestures on burlap) painted on a sheet of copper. There seemed to be something Flemish about the even light, the pallor of the flesh, and the even cast of the artist's attention. But there, on the edge of familiarity, its likeness to the modes of older portraiture stopped. What a strange, ophidian modernity this small image had, and still retains! One did not need to know it was the head of a living artist to sense that Freud had caught a kind of visual truth, at once sharply focused and evasively inward, that rarely showed itself in painting before the twentieth century.
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