SPEAKER 1: 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 canvases, it's a very, very
forthright nude. SPEAKER 2: Yeah. She's life-size and
oddly positioned in that you expect
her to be lying down, almost viewed from above. And most nudes are horizontal. So the fact that
she's vertical is odd. And then we notice
that she's actually standing, and yet leaning. It's very odd. SPEAKER 1: 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. There's weight on her feet. But at the same time,
she's also leaning back. And then she's leaning on, as
she says in a taped interview, she's leaning on a heater, which
is actually warming the rags. Apparently this was
painted at night. And it must have 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's
a conscious 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, really in
the most unsparing way, of weight, of fat, of bone,
of temperature, of texture, all of those things,
that experience is something that
is so incredibly immediate and powerful. SPEAKER 2: You know, what
I see largely is paint. I see a body. But I'm also
simultaneously seeing paint-- I mean,
this really thick, almost stippling 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. SPEAKER 1: 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's
also sort of forcing us to rethink all of those
assumptions in a pretty violent and aggressive way. SPEAKER 2: That's
absolutely true. We sort of feel like, I
don't want to look at this. SPEAKER 1: Right. SPEAKER 2: You have
a 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. SPEAKER 1: When I see
those kinds of distortions in Lucian Freud's work,
I see, in some ways, an attempt to place the body
in the most direct way, almost in a more perceptually immediate
way, than the sort of more classically proportioned
figure might be. So that he's trying
to create the reality, in a sense, of that part that
may be even slightly dislocated from another. SPEAKER 2: So there's
a kind of confrontation of the viewer that's going on. SPEAKER 1: I think that's right. There's no question. SPEAKER 2: She's so
close to us, too. SPEAKER 1: 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 the kind of properness
of a museum context. Nevertheless, this is
a kind of revelation of the reality of
our own bodies.