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Freud, grandson of Sigmund, was born in Germany in 1922. He grew up in Berlin, but his parents brought him to London in 1939, barely in front of the rising wave of Nazi persecution. In England his schooling was irregular and "progressive" -- even today his handwriting is that of a 10-year-old -- and although he had some art training, he was basically self-taught. Freud's German origins have suggested to some critics that early works like Girl with Roses, 1947-48, a portrait of his first wife, Kitty Garman, daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, were done under the spell of the German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) portraiture of the 1920s -- painters like Otto Dix or Christian Schad. Actually the basis was much earlier: Albrecht Durer, whose fixedly staring, ultradetailed watercolors set Freud's first standards about the inspection of faces and bodies.
Then, around 1958, Freud took to using stiffer brushes -- hog hair, not sable -- that forced broader and more pictorially solid shapes into the paint with which he depicted flesh, helping him compose the body's structure in terms of twisting and displacement. This "Freud effect" is not unlike the quick, coarse expressiveness of Frans Hals, but less benign. A broader stroke didn't diminish the closeness of his inspection. If Velazquez had ever chosen to paint water dribbling from a spout, he might have come up with the sort of brilliant fiction about unstable, passing appearances that Freud achieved in Two Japanese Wrestlers by a Sink, 1983-87. (The "Japanese wrestlers" of the title are not real sumo contenders, but fragmentary pictures of them pinned to the wall.) There are amazing feats of sheer visual dissection in this show, such as the view from the studio window, Wasteground with Houses, Paddington, 1970-72, or Two Plants, 1977-80, in which it seems that every leaf of hundreds has been given its own specific color, structure and marking in a way that John Ruskin might have approved.
Ruskin would not, however, have approved of Freud's nudes, any more than some feminists do today. These figures, splayed under the inquisitorial electric light and the downward gaze of the artist, are the mainstay of his work, and the fierceness with which they reject the softening conventions of the "studio nude" has provoked a bumper crop of balderdash about Freud's supposed misogyny and sexism. (Freud's own riposte, in a recent interview, was terse: "I think the idea of misogyny is a stimulant to feminists, and it's rather like anti-Semites looking for Jewish noses everywhere.")
You can hardly not know -- given the amount of gossip that has lately dropped on Freud's closely guarded personal life -- that all the models are people with some specific relation to the artist as friends, lovers, daughters. But the nature of that relationship doesn't appear in the painting, and everyone is treated with the same relentless scrutiny of physical fact, so that a chin or an elbow acquires the same intensity, as painting, as a breast or a pubic mound. The results have much to do with modeling -- physical manipulation, as though the body were being reconstructed in the medium of paint, crowded with bumps and hollows, and bursting with life.