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My feelings about the work of Lucien Freud...
First... I don't like the portrait of queen Elizabeth. It's terrible, not worthy for the man who could paint the earlier posted self-portrait. I have seen queen Elizabeth on television. She looks cold-hearted but not like she was covered in mud, like Freud painted her.
I don't like his work for the 'ability to provoke'. I like his self-portrait because it's a good painting. Nothing else. If I defend his work it is for the quality of that self-portrait mainly.
His provocative way of doing things, confronting us with uncomfortable poses and compositions are -in the end- annoying to me and show me that Freud believes in the myth of the great and critical artist, and it makes his work worse. It's a kind of mannerism. To me, Freud threw away much of his talent by having this attitude. It may work one or two times, but it becomes a cheap way of doing things in the hands of a too self-concious and very, very succesfull and rich artist. It ends up as a parody or image-building.
Freud is considered a great painter, in this day and age, but his best handling of the paint comes nowhere near the painterly qualities of Rembrandt in his later work. That Freud is considered as one of todays greatest painters shows that there are no really great painters like Velazquez, Vermeer or Rembrandt at this moment.
Greetings,
Peter
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