Freud, Standing by the Rags

Art History

1960 - Age of Post-Colonialism

The Postwar Figure

Bacon, Triptych - August 1972
Freud, Standing by the Rags
Diane Arbus, Boy with a Toy Hand Grenade
William Eggleston, Red Ceiling, or Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973
Ed Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz Useful Art #5: The Western Hotel, 1992

Freud, Standing by the Rags Lucian Freud, Standing by the Rags, 1988-89, oil on canvas, 66.5 x 54.5 in. (168.9 x 138.4 cm), (Tate Britain, London) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Steven Zucker

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Freud, Standing by the Rags

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We're in Tate Britain and we're looking at Lucian Freud's "Standing by the Rags" from 1988-89
It's a pretty big oil and like so many of his canveses it's a very, very forthright nude
Yes she's life-sized and oddly positioned in that he expects her to be lying down
almost viewed from above, you know most nudes are horizontal
So the fact that she's vertical is odd and then we notice she's actually standing and yet leaning. It's very odd
It is. The space is really difficult to read, in part, because the rags give us no indication
of space and actually obstruct the angle between the floor and the wall
which would give us some kind of clue as to what's going on.
And so she is standing this weight on her feet
But at the same time she is also leaning back leaning back right?
And then she's leaning on, as she says in the taped interview,
she's leaning on a heater, which is actually warming the rags
Apparently this was painted at night, and it must've been exhausting for her
But here's the thing about Freud. I don't think any of that is important for him.
I don't think that there is a conscience interest in dismantling perspective
or any of those kinds of goals. I think that his concern was to reveal the experience of
the body itself in the most direct and tangible way.
Since we all share the experience of inhabiting a body
his rendering in really the most unsparing way of weight, of fat, of bone, of temperature, of texture
All of those things that experience that is so incredibly immediate and powerful
You know, what I see largely is paint.
I see a body but I'm also simueltaneously seeing paint that is really thick
almost stifling of it. Around her face and neck and chest especially,
a little bit on her thighs and calves and knees.
But really, the face is almost broken apart by the paint
Think about the incredible tradition of painting the nude throughout the history of art.
This idealization, this beauty.
And that handling the paint is not only actually conveying
the body but it is also forcing us to rethink all those assumptions
in a pretty violent and aggressive way.
That is absolutely true. You know, we sort of feel like
I don't I want to look at this
Right
You have very immediate, kind of visceral reaction to it.
There's no question.
In some ways there's a kind of actuality and realism to the body
and in other ways the body is really quite distorted here.
Her feet are too large, her right arm is way too long, and that foreshortening of her forearm and wrist is a little bit off.
There's a kind of distortion.
When I see these kind of distortions in Lucien Freud's work
I see in some ways an attempt to place the body in the most direct way
almost in a perceptually immediate way than a more classically proportioned figure might be.
So he is trying to create the reality, in a sense, of that part
That maybe he gets slightly dislocated from another
So there's a kind of confrontation of the viewer
I think that' right.
that's going on
There is no question
She's so close to us too
And she's a reflection of who we are, even though we're clothed, we're upright
We may enter into the view of the painting with a
kind of properness in a museum context.
Nevertheless this is a kind of revelation of the reality of our own bodies.

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