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Since the late '80s, Freud's work has become more audacious in its ability to deal with extremes of physical presence without sliding into caricature. In part this is due to his finding a new model in the form of Leigh Bowery, a huge, soft, hairless, child-faced, pierced-cheeked performance artist who might, in earlier days, have modeled Bacchuses for Rubens. Freud's paintings of this man-mountain are done in a spirit not far from amazement: his + excitement in traversing Bowery's back in Naked Man, Back View, 1991-92, is so palpable that you'd think he was exploring a new landscape -- as, in fact, he was.
Life or art? Both. Freud insists that he always lets his sitters take their own natural poses, rather than setting them up -- as well they might, given the arduous business of being painted for 80 sittings or more under the glare of the 200-watt bulbs in his studio. But whether by accident or design, flashbacks to past art do crop up regularly.
It probably isn't possible to paint a naked human back without remembering Ingres's bathers, but Bowery's pose also recalls Goya's giant looming over its landscape. The conjunction of his massive and dynamically arched trunk with the waiflike body of the sleeping girl in And the Bridegroom, 1993, evokes the gross strong men and tiny dancers of Picasso's Rose Period. The lanky bodies on the iron studio bed in Two Women, 1992, are a little like Courbet's lesbians, without the Second Empire titillation. A naked man on his back, one leg up and a sock dangling from the other foot, penis flopping askew, turns out to echo closely the pose of that Hellenistic image of postbacchanalian fatigue, the Barberini Faun. And so on. Freud doesn't quote ostentatiously, but he is an artist with a full memory -- as any serious painter must be. There is no level on which he could be accused of having an "innocent eye."
Can one imagine a painter like Freud emerging in America today? It's hard to, maybe impossible. He affronts too many orthodoxies, starting with the central one: the belief that realism -- the painting of things from direct observation, warts and all -- is dead or, at best, irrelevant. You may quote the human figure from mass-media sources, by means of photography, silk-screen and so forth. Or stylize the guts out of it, so that it approaches abstraction. Or else run "expressionist" variants on it, which have nothing to say about any struggle with the real and resistant motif, since no such struggle is encouraged.
American official taste -- late-modernist taste -- shows no real or sustained interest in artists who are prepared to make a life's work out of the challenge of imbuing real figures and objects with strong plastic meaning in deep space. There are a few exemptions, such as Philip Pearlstein, but that is all, unless you want to count Andrew Wyeth's Helgas, those goose-pimply feminine-hygiene ads that are to painting more or less what The Bridges of Madison County is to the novel. It seems that with the single exception of Thomas Eakins, who died more than 75 years ago, this culture has never produced a great painter of the naked body. It's pinups or diagrams, and not much in between.