Most artists, one imagines, dream of achieving a great late style -- the uprush and resolution in old age, careless of aesthetic risk, sometimes even a little mad, that carry a life's effort into profundity. Few, obviously, manage anything of the sort. The retrospective of paintings by Lucian Freud, 71, which opened last week at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, sets before us one who has.
To see Freud's new work at full stretch, one need only look at the final painting in the show, finished just last month (too late for the catalog): Evening in the Studio. It shows the inside of the artist's London workplace, a medium-size and undistinguished room with blotched walls. There is an iron bed on whose thin, lumpy mattress a whippet sleeps. Next to the bed is a scrawny- looking girl with an angular face, sewing an ornate piece of Indian cotton whose green and red whorls cascade over her lap like the tendrils of an exotic plant, out of place in the drab surroundings. But it is not these things you notice -- not, anyway, at first.
What you see, what confronts and monopolizes your gaze, is a woman on the floor in the foreground. Her bulk is colossal, almost comic. She simply blows away the decorum of the nude -- the ideal body re-formed by thought. She isn't nude but aggressively naked, a biological mountain: swollen thighs and belly, pubic ravine, breasts like boulders, their stretch marks and blotches half- echoing the surface texture of the girl's cloth. The strength of her presence isn't due just to her depicted fatness but to the way the image burgeons from dense paint, a heavy mass like cream with gravel in it. For in his own way Freud has done (in this picture and others) what Velazquez did: assimilate the life of the subject to the life of the paint surface and of each gesture held in it. Very few painters can do this. It is not a trick. This is the difference between painting something and merely rendering it -- between Freud's fat woman, which is radical art of the highest intensity, and, say, Fernando Botero's fat women, which are boring essays in the pneumatics of style.
Freud's last show in America was at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington in 1987. It didn't go to New York. It wasn't modern enough for the Museum of Modern Art; and at the Met there was a suspicion that, as one of its senior staff remarked, "Lucian can be wonderful one picture at a time, but a row of 20 could be a bit of a bore." Happily, the museum has now changed its tune and hung some 80 Freuds, the earliest done in 1945, the latest finished this year.
It is not, to put it mildly, a bit of a bore. For Freud, despite his quota of failed pictures (failed, however, by standards to which most living artists don't aspire), is the best realist painter alive. To watch the development of his work -- even in the abbreviated form of one show -- is like watching a wily cock salmon compelled upstream by instinct, against the cataracts of modernist history, following its desires. Most of the major stylistic events in art since 1900, starting with late Cezanne and going on through Cubism to abstraction in its various forms, have had no apparent impact on Freud's painting. He is a rebuke to superficial notions of determinism.