National Gallery, London
From the monarch to the naked performance artist who was living with Aids, Freud paints life lived in the face of death, with an unsentimental eye for human tenderness
Even the Queen of England, said Andy Warhol, can’t buy a better hot dog than the bum on the sidewalk. Another thing the Queen of England couldn’t buy was a flattering portrait by Lucian Freud. When he painted Elizabeth II at the start of this millennium, he treated her face with the same harsh objectivity as any other face, a closeup of wrinkles and sags, tight mouth and unhappy eyes, under coils of grey hair, with the absurd addition of a crown. Was Freud a republican? He certainly wasn’t a sentimental royalist.
This royal head rests uneasy on a wall of equally unvarnished portraits of famous and unfamous faces in the National Gallery’s addictive centenary blockbuster Freud show. It is a key to his art, for it is so movingly unpretentious – in an almost adolescent way – in its declaration of the artist’s moral mission. A portrait, says this portrait, must be brutally true. Face to face with a monarch, an artist has only two options: be a courtier or a truth-teller. Freud takes the path he always does, warts and all. His genius is his innocent simplicity. Just look and be honest about what you see. It was the clearest, most humble of creeds, yet it meant ignoring a truckload of philosophical and artistic distractions, over a long working lifetime.
