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As a result, the human figure, which for thousands of years was the container and vehicle of art's most exalted as well as its coarsest intentions, languishes in late-modern American painting like a vestigial sign, atrophied. This is not because abstract art attained its Utopian ends of making representation obsolete -- we all know it didn't -- but because the culture forgot that there was anything to do with bodies and faces except photograph them. It's as though America, maddened and warped by its own erotomania, its obsession with and fear of the flesh, and further blocked by its newly acquired worries about sexual politics, can no longer imagine how to paint a naked human being. And even if it wanted to, the skills needed to do so have been edited out of all but a few art schools and are, in the main, no longer taught.
What passes for avant-garde style today is mostly recycled and tired, a thrice-dipped tea bag. There is not only a place but a burning need for art whose images are worldly, skilled, robustly embodied and keenly felt. This is what Freud, by taking nothing for granted and looking over the very brink of his perceptions, supplies.