The oversized postcard announcing the new Robert Graham show at David Zwirner shows a woman sleeping on a mattress in a big, cloudy white box.  Receiving it was like getting a dream in the mail.  The sculpture on the card is one of seventeen of Graham’s early works from 1963-1973 on display.  I know Graham only through the brass entrance doors and angel he crafted for the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles.  Those pieces are gravely and self-consciously classical.  The sculptures at the gallery, tabletop plexiglass dioramas with naked and barely-clothed female figures inside, are stranger and more intimate.  The women walk, crawl, lounge around, play with one another, and just stand still.  It’s easy to say that the sculptures objectify women, but Graham’s handling of each figure is so fine and naturalistic, that one comes away feeling he cares for them dearly.

The vitrines he’s fashioned for these women – lined with felt, pierced with wires, patched with tape and paint, partitioned with bits of mirror and clear plastic – are spectacularly suggestive architecturally.  Almost all are square in plan and lifted on low plinths.  They reminded me a little of Mies van der Rohe’s houses, and a lot of Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion, with its life-size female figure (a neoclassical bronze statue called Morning by George Kolbe) presiding inside.  Architectural historian Vincent Scully has described this woman as a goddess figure, pushing and pulling the planes of the lucid structure back and forth.  The women in Graham’s sculptures are more inward-looking, and less robust.  The surfaces around them, that enclose them, seem like extensions of their own fragile inner lives.  Although these women are set out on display, each seems to be holding a great deal in reserve.

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.