The great painter Lucian Freud died, and the obituaries dutifully noted that he was the world’s most expensive living painter, and that he had, in 2001, completed a boldly unflattering portrait of Queen Elizabeth.  They didn’t talk openly about what Freud painted most often and best, which was naked flesh, male and female, including his own.  The Washington Post described him in their lede as a “Painter of the Human Form,” and the New York Times as a “Figurative Painter who Redefined Portraiture."  Remembering that Freud was Sigmund Freud’s grandson, the omission of the real subject of his work, the naked body, seems impossibly prudish and particularly revealing.

The body finds rich representation in the dense, turbulent surface of Freud’s paintings.  The oils rise and form their own geography.  The paintings I like best feature Leigh Bowery, the late club kid and performance artist.  Bowery was a big, bald Australian man who went around dressed like a sinister, androgynous martian.  Freud’s paintings strip him of this acrid, brilliantly constructed identity, reducing him to blunt facts of the flesh.  Freud exposed the body with all of its particularities and vulnerabilities, but he wasn’t cruel.  His nudes are clear-eyed, monumental and also tender.  That might be its own kind of mastery.