(2) Ageing.

Illustration 1: ‘Painter Working: Reflection’ (1993) by Lucian Freud (1922-2011); exhibited in ‘Lucian Freud, Paintings and Etchings, 1996’ (27 paintings, 13 etchings); Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal (25/06/1996 to 08/09/1996).

Lucian Freud at the age of seventy, wearing only unlaced boots. The painting fits within a long tradition of artists showing themselves making art; although no mirror is evident, a concept of optical ‘reflection’ is emphasised in the title. Whether this implies a philosophical position too, is less clear. Freud is on record as having considered self-portraiture a process: not of psychological examination, but a research into looking and seeing.

‘He paints proximity: the sensation of being near and intimate, or near and fascinated’ – William Feaver.

Standing somewhat defiantly, with a palette for shield and palette-knife as dagger, the artist presents himself like a classical warrior.

Illustration 2: Naked Spartan.

Kenneth Clark argued that the ancient ‘Greek cult of absolute nakedness’ demonstrated a conquest of all moral inhibition (‘The Nude’, 1956). With reference to Lucian Freud, it seems the painter is daring himself to adopt a role normally assumed by hired models.

‘I thought, after putting so many other people through it, I ought to subject myself to the same treatment’ – Lucian Freud.

A Gothic and Northern Renaissance preference for the particular rather than the ideal runs through much British art; alongside a recurring, English predilection for shabby or unsavoury details. In both senses, Freud’s method can be traced backwards, in the twentieth-century, through Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) to Walter Sickert (1860-1942).

‘The plastic arts are gross arts, dealing joyously with gross material facts’ – Walter Sickert.

Illustration 3: The artist’s palette.

Freud takes paint from a palette and uses it to fashion an image of palette-and-paint; not only an image but its very substance, the same stuff that recreates floorboards, bedding, walls and skin; including blobs of pigment which make-up the subject’s flaccid penis, hanging in marked contrast to a hard painting-knife raised upright. As a comment on the septuagenarian male, perhaps the artist is making a statement about sublimation – the transferring of generative energy from aged ‘cock-and-balls’ to the canvas itself. There may also be a humorous or absurdist angle too (not least because working in the nude is such an uncomfortable and impractical thing to do!): that the phallus, a common symbol of potency, is often a piece-of-flesh which can’t possibly match the burden of cultural expectation loaded onto it.

Illustration 1: ‘Les Fiançailles de M. Hire’ (‘Mr Hire’s Engagement’), 1933; novella by Georges Simenon.

Illustration 2: ‘Monsieur Hire’, 1989; film directed by Patrice Leconte; cinematography by Denis Lenoir.

‘Monsieur Hire’ (actor, Michel Blanc) is a bachelor, who ritualistically observes ‘Alice’ (actress, Sandrine Bonnaire) whilst playing one piece of music over-and-over. His natural reserve is reflected in the choice of composer – Brahms. The viewer is aware, also, that he’s suspected of murder.

Illustration 3: ‘Plano Quartet, Op. 25’, 1861, by Johannes Brahms.

Menacing and shifting rhythms in the piano theme (‘Movement 4: Presto’, G Minor) are an apposite accompaniment to the transgressive situation shown onscreen; and a perspective mediated by two windows seems potentially predatorial, with Alice an unknowing victim.

Illustration 4: Two window-frames (film still).

This scene, however, subverts any Hitchcockian (‘Rear Window’, film, 1954) expectations. A gypsy melody (‘Rondo Alla Zingarese’) for strings evokes the reckless, uncontrollable passion that will leave Monsieur Hire, himself, exposed. Furthermore, the woman under scrutiny is more self-contained, and less guileless, than first appears.

Hire’s fixed, obsessive gaze isn’t salacious (the narrative makes it clear that he finds an outlet for other kinds of passions with prostitutes). As each window-frame slowly dissolves, any notion of impropriety gives way to his open fascination with another person’s state-of-being.

Illustration 5: Dissolving frames (film still).

When our viewpoint switches to the voyeur’s profile, the accompanying music – in a circular fashion – becomes bittersweet and sad. It conveys a feeling of contemplating someone who is very beautiful, but from a position of great loneliness and inadequacy.

Illustration 6: Hire’s isolation.

There’s a thematic resemblance, I think, to Thomas Hardy’s character ‘Boldwood’, in ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’ (novel, 1874). Both stories develop a disturbing notion that some individuals are fated not to love, or be loved; and how, in pursuing love anyway, it will prove a force that ultimately destroys them.

(1) Penis.

Illustration 1: ‘Double Nude Portrait’ (1937), Stanley Spencer; Tate Britain, London, UK.

Stanley Spencer (1891 – 1959) may have hidden ‘Double Nude Portrait’ from view until his death. In some ways, this reflects upon the condition of British morality in the 1930s. It also points toward a deeper, underlying anxiety – that any kind of visual material with a graphic, sexual component will bear an inevitable resemblance to pornography. There are similarities of method: a use of close-up, which hones-in upon details that are most desired; and the unseemly bodily positions (e.g. legs and arms held apart), presented free of any conventional restriction to edit; then, there’s the informal title ‘Leg of Mutton Nude’, referring to a joint in the right-foreground (a suggestion of woman as meat, perhaps). A nude female dominates the lower-half of the composition, like a cradle or hollow; into this space the naked, male artist squats and observes. Each figure appears superimposed, being modelled to a precise contour line; they overlap – and their surfaces produce a tension which can only be satisfied through touching – but there is no contact. Spencer invites the viewer to follow his eye, as it scans across his lover’s form. By including himself, however, he disturbs our expectation of where the centre is. It stands as a double portrait which is, in fact, an augmented self-portrait. Also, the nature of the gaze is unfiltered: equally inclined to notice, for example, the effect of gravity upon a gentleman’s scrotum as a lady’s sagging breasts and stretched nipples. He viewed sex in religious terms, like a sacred act; but this seems at odds with his unidealized representation – the awkwardness of our bodies being a reality we must all negotiate.

Illustration 2: Stanley Spencer (photographic detail).

Working ‘point-to-point’ across the canvas, in a Pre-Raphaelite manner, the painter scrutinises multiple focal areas – one element being as worthy of attention as another. Of central value (and placement), however, is the penis. The painting can be seen as a response to the problem of how to show it; also, that the organ itself is a ‘problem’, or at least a question mark. Spencer had forsaken his first wife, Hilda Carline, and begun an affair with Patricia Preece – the artist’s model here – who he married. He came to regret this decision. ‘Double Nude Portrait’ is (like Picasso’s ‘The Three Dancers’, 1925) a depiction of a triangular relationship, with the third party – Hilda – ‘off-stage’. Preece was probably a fake: interested only in financial security, so she could support Dorothy Hepworth, her true lover. A sense of conflicted interests, between sex and money, is conveyed by the differing skin tones. Male ardour is reflected in the warm glow of a woman, and symbolised by the background fire. Female calculation and indifference is likewise echoed in the bloodless complexion of the man. It’s likely the marriage was never consummated; mutton being also a comment on the artist’s ‘uncooked meat’, or penile ambivalence. The hyper-real style has a claustrophobic, confrontational effect; as the anticipated arousal caused by close physical proximity provides no escape from underlying personal problems.

1) Lucian Freud (1922 – 2011): ‘Small Naked Portrait’, 1974.

This painting was included in an exhibition of Lucian Freud’s work at Abbot Hall, Kendal, UK, in 1996.

Freud’s sensibility is more Darwinian (Charles Darwin, 1809 – 1882) than ‘Freudian’ (Sigmund Freud, 1856 – 1939), in the sense that he emphasises the physical, animal part of a human-being. The model isn’t simply nude, but feels naked. In ‘Small Naked Portrait’, 1974, a dirty right heel is visible, alongside an inelegant semi-exposure of genitalia. The painter, however, in this instance, appears to temporarily relax his ruthless, objectifying eye, permitting an uncustomary note of tenderness. There’s a suggestion of an inward, dreaming state that can only be hinted at through Realism. His method of looking, endlessly, over extended periods of time, elevates a tactile feeling for surface to the level of acute intimacy; a sensitivity which vibrates as texture and mark-making. In a comment reminiscent of John Constable’s statement ‘Painting is but another word for feeling’, Lucian Freud said:

‘A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt’ (‘Some Thoughts on Painting’, 1954).

2) L. S. Lowry (1887 – 1976): ‘The Man With Red Eyes’, 1938.

This work was included in the exhibition ‘Modern Visionaries: Van Dyck and the Artist’s Eye’, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, which I saw in 2017.

The auto-portrait often displays a painter’s trappings – mirror, easel, paintbrushes etc – as elements in a deliberate process of artistic self-affirmation. Lowry, however, depicts himself both generically (as ‘The Man’) and psychologically; somewhat like imagining how you might appear to others, but from the inside-out. ‘The Man With Red Eyes’ dates from a period when the artist’s mother was very ill. There’s a suggestion of necrosis in his olive-green flesh tones; and the lacrimal points – a vivid scarlet – hint at suppressed emotional anguish. The face gazes out toward something beyond us. Perhaps it’s an intimation of the loss of a parent – with the accompanying anxiety that this foresight brings – and of one’s sense of self also?

(1) Cruelty.

Illustration 1: ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, 1947, play.

‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ explores the domestic conflict that develops after Blanche DuBois, a widow and disgraced English teacher, ‘comes down in the world’, moving in to her sister (Stella) and brother-in-law’s (Stanley Kowalski) run-down quarters in New Orleans. Blanche is a last representative of an aristocratic, colonial, French Huguenot family, from which there is now only financial estrangement.

Illustration 2: Stella (left), Blanche (centre) and Stanley (right); from Elia Kazan’s 1951 film version.

Kowalski, who may be a Polish immigrant (Scene One), belongs to a new, post-war class of US citizen and vehemently asserts he is ‘one hundred per cent American’ (Scene Eight). His systematic psychological, physical and, finally, sexual assault on Blanche reflects a form-of twisted Darwinian logic, as brute animal instinct weeds-out and annihilates anything effete or over-refined.

Illustration 3: Charles Darwin (1809-1882), who developed the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.

Stella Kowalski is warned, ‘Don’t – hang back with the brutes’ (Scene Four), but is ultimately prepared to overlook the abuse of her sibling, and surrenders ‘luxuriously’ to Stanley’s promises of ‘coloured lights’ (sex) and ‘voluptuous’ coaxing (Scene 11).

Illustration 4: Stella surrenders to Stanley; Kim Hunter, actress (1951 film).

Cruelty is a central theme in the play. Firstly, there’s willed cruelty – a premeditated rape: ‘We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning!’ (Scene Ten). Then, even more damning, perhaps, is Stanley’s conscious and directed effort to push an emotionally exhausted individual to the point of breakdown.

Illustration 5: Stanley assaults Blanche; Marlon Brando, actor (1951 film).

Secondly, there’s the cruelty of circumstance: as Blanche, a hypersensitive character, is left to fend for herself in brutal and exacerbating surroundings. She possesses a heightened awareness – and fierce sense of moral anger – that is common, I think, to those with chronic nervous illness; but married to a wavering power of insight (what Williams describes as a ‘neurasthenic personality’), that perceives the injustice of the world but is too broken to fight against it: ‘ … some things are not forgivable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable’ (Scene Ten).

Illustration 6: Vivien Leigh, actress, as Blanche Dubois (1951 film).

(9) Soul.

Illustration 1: Gwen John, Self Portrait 1902; oil on canvas; Tate Britain, London.

A profoundly underrated Welsh artist, Gwen John (1876-1939) lived austerely – in a London squat at one point – and mainly in France from her late twenties onwards. Studying at the male-dominated Slade School in England, under Henry Tonks, reinforced a sense of self-containment, evident in her paintings – see Self Portrait 1902. Bisexual, she was Augustus John’s sister, Rainer Maria Rilke’s friend, James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s pupil and Auguste Rodin’s lover (the affair was documented in correspondence, and its break-up triggered John’s conversion to Catholicism).

Illustration 2: Self Portrait With Letter 1907-1909; watercolour and gouache on paper; The Rodin Museum, Paris.

She pursued thenceforward a solitary existence, making little-or-no art for her final six years, and possibly starved herself to death.

‘I may never have anything to express, except this desire for a more interior life’ – Gwen John.

John depicts women, including herself, who are attentively aware; or distracted in private worlds that are somewhat withheld from us. This mood is communicated through the nervy, attenuated handling of figures in space, and texture in light. The model’s gaze is active: either a form of self-contemplation, or staring directly at and beyond the viewer.

Illustration 3: Chloë Boughton-Leigh 1904-1908; oil on canvas; Tate Modern, London.

The artist introduces subtle distortions that emphasise her subject’s paleness and thinness. The female form is compressed so as to make air vibrate with feeling around each body. Surfaces resonate merely as an echo of a truer, undisclosed surface.

Illustration 4: Girl with Bare Shoulders (Fenella Lovell) 1909-1910?; oil on canvas.

Portrait-sitters are directly and intimately present, but curiously withdrawn. The overall impression is of isolation. Clothing ripples, presses and dissolves against their compacted frames, as if animated.

Illustration 5: Nude Girl (Fenella Lovell) 1909-1910; oil on canvas; Tate Britain.

And yet, its removal discloses only a further ambiguity or dissolution of form: as the focus shifts not towards feminine carnality, but to a woman’s psyche or ‘soul’.

Illustration 6: Self Portrait Naked, Sitting on a Bed; pencil and watercolour on paper.

In Self Portrait Naked, Sitting on a Bed, the exposed pictorial ground makes any modelling of John’s naked body appear to float tenuously. Clothing or flesh have been stripped-back, suggesting a physical passion withheld, as if sublimated into pure spirit.

(4) Pain.

Illustration 1: ‘The Broken Column’ (1944), Frida Kahlo.

In ‘The Broken Column’ (1944), Frida Kahlo stands before a bleak, fissured landscape which resembles her own dissected body – the parts being scaffolded by a therapeutic corset. (She had polio in childhood and was involved in a dangerous bus accident as a young adult; both events brought about a cycle of miscarriage and abortion, reinforcing a fear of being unable to bear children.)

“My painting carries with it the message of pain” – Frida Kahlo.

Illustration 2: Frida Kahlo (1907-54).

A salient feature of this painting is its overriding sense of chronic pain: both physical and psychological. Pain is a highly subjective physiological state; we struggle to feel someone else’s but can instantly recognize our own. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) challenged the tendency, in human society, to downplay its importance: “Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful.” This pessimistic view may have a positive value: an awareness of one’s own discomfort might be the strongest determinant of individual character. People actively avoid pain, in general, but all eventually experience some form of it. Pain, therefore, imposes a firm grip on the shape of our personal history.

Is ‘The Broken Column’ an expression of the singular nature of female pain? Diego Rivera (artist, 1886-1957), on Kahlo, referred to “ … those general and specific themes which exclusively affect women.” A cracked, Ionic pillar could, indeed, be interpreted as the fracturing of masculine, classical reason. The earth, however (a common symbol of the female body, implying emotional, somatic and irrational drives), is likewise splintered. Perhaps there’s a sense of sexual ambivalence here? (Kahlo was bisexual). An assertion that pain is a ‘gender-free’ and universal force. Her facial features are impassive, in spite of tears, suggesting a feeling of containment: that an intense meditation upon, and recognition of, pain is what is holding the separate pieces together.

“My eyes are twinkling … that is my little joke on pain and suffering” – Frida Kahlo.

(5) Growth.

Illustration 3: Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907); Expressionist painter who lived and worked in Worpswede, Northern Germany.

Paula Modersohn-Becker is often credited as being the first female artist to unambiguously depict herself naked. In ‘Self Portrait on Her Sixth Wedding Anniversary’ (1906), she resembles some kind of Earth Mother effigy – draped with amber beads – from a primitive cult. Becker eventually became pregnant, but after the painting was begun: what does this mean?

Illustration 4: ‘Self Portrait on Her Sixth Wedding Anniversary’ / ‘Selbstbildnis am 6. Hochzeitstag’ (1906), by Paula Modersohn-Becker.

I have a sense that her gaze is directed inward, and not at the viewer. The austere mode of representation communicates emotion unfussily, with minimal pretension. This is in keeping with the philosophy of Worpswede’s bohemian community, which favoured simple, rural peasant life over sophistication or urbanity.

Paula Modersohn-Becker, in fact, straddled both worlds: by 1906, she had fled Germany (and her husband, Otto, with whom she was anxious not to have a child) to work in Paris. Many painters struggle to combine career with family – a problem that is more pressing for women – and often refer to their creative productions as surrogate ‘children’. In this context, ‘Self Portrait on Her Sixth Wedding Anniversary’ appears to be meant as a metaphor for the satisfaction that accompanies artistic growth (and an intimation of, and anxiety related to, future motherhood), rather than a literal representation of one pregnant woman.

“Character is fate” – (attributed to Heraclitus, 6th-5th c. BCE).

The succeeding events in Paula Modersohn-Becker’s life argue for a power of prescience that springs from acute self-awareness. In 1907 she gave birth to a girl, but Becker died from a post-partum embolism soon after. Ironically, her daughter – Mathilde – later became instrumental in creating a foundation which preserved her mother’s artistic legacy.

“Why do you want to make me think that, in the amber beads of your self-portrait, there was still a heaviness that can exist in the serene heaven of paintings? Why do you show me an evil omen in the way you stand? What makes you read the contours of your body like the lines engraved inside a palm, so I cannot see them now except as fate?” – Rainer Maria Rilke, from ‘Requiem For A Friend’ (1908), a tribute to Paula Modersohn-Becker, translated by Stephen Mitchell.

Illustration 1 – Peter Paul Rubens: ‘Descent from the Cross,’ 1611-1614.

Apart from a brief period during the Napoleonic Wars, this altarpiece has remained in its original location (Illustration 2).

Illustration 2 – Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp.

Christopher, a patron saint of the guild that financed the painting, is depicted in one of the external panels. A legend, compiled by Jacobus De Voragine, describes Christopher carrying the ‘unbearable’ weight of the Christ Child. This has an important association with the Eucharistic elevation of consecrated wafer, symbolizing the body of Christ. In artistic terms it’s the concept of weight, or ‘dead weight’ (and how Rubens represents this), that most interests me.

Illustration 3 – Rubens: ‘The Elevation of the Cross,’ 1610-1611.

‘Descent from the Cross’ has a companion piece, ‘The Elevation of the Cross’ (Illustration 3), which was moved to the cathedral from its original site. This earlier work epitomises a Baroque ideal of energy in motion. As the crucifix is pulled towards the picture plane, the men at work generate a centripetal force that is focused in the figure of Christ (who is represented heroically).

In ‘Descent from the Cross’ this process is inverted: energy is dispersed, centrifugally, away from the lowered corpse, and is transmitted through the physical gestures and reactions of figures (including St. John, Joseph of Arimathea and the Virgin Mary). The two paintings, when paired, have a contrasting effect of extreme pose and counter-pose, perhaps indicating Rubens’ absorption of Mannerist developments in art. Although Christ retains a Michelangelesque form, it’s the collapse of this in ‘Descent from the Cross’ – like a visual expression of entropy – that so effectively conveys a sense of sorrow, and of the body’s vulnerability.

Illustration 4 – Sculptures by George Minne, inside The Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent (Belgium).

Illustration 5 – George Minne: ‘Mother Weeping For Her Dead Child,’ 1886.

In ‘Mother Weeping For Her Dead Child’ (Illustration 4) by George Minne, a Belgian Art Nouveau sculptor, there’s a comparable, but secular, representation of the actuality of death; and an opposing life force, communicated through the convulsive counter-movement of the mother’s head and upper body.

Rubens belongs to a Flemish Realist tradition, whereby the emotional and spiritual are intimately connected to what is corporeal. Minne seems to represent an alternative European tendency in art: to pare-back and attenuate physical form, until a psychological essence has been reached.

‘You do believe in God don’t you?’

A jaded, unnamed NYPD detective (actor, Harvey Keitel) questions a young nun, who has been viciously raped by two local youths (Illustration 1). Her forgiveness of the crime, and unwillingness to reveal their identities, triggers his breakdown in a church (Illustration 2).

Illustration 1.

Illustration 2.

“And Jesus answering said unto them, ‘They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance'” – Luke 5: 31-32.

The narrative is unambiguous in asserting just how ‘bad’ this character has been: obtaining sexual favours from women who are meant to be under his protection; misappropriating drugs taken from a crime scene; visiting prostitutes. In a state of moral collapse and mental distress (owing gambling repayments to mobsters), he experiences a contemporary, counter-cultural vision of Jesus, stimulated by alcohol and drug abuse. The resulting ‘apparition’ is palpably present, including wounds (Illustration 3), like a figure painted by Caravaggio (Illustration 4) – eventually transforming back into the countenance of an ordinary person.

Illustration 3.

Illustration 4: Caravaggio, ‘The Incredulity of Saint Thomas’, 1601-1602 (detail).

The muteness of Christ is notable too, echoing the silent ‘second coming’, fictionalized in the ‘Grand Inquisitor’ section of ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, 1879-80, by Dostoevsky (Illustration 5), in contrast to the detective’s profane and blasphemous monologue.

Illustration 5: ‘The Grand Inquisitor’; illustrator, Ilya Glazunov.

It’s one of only two insertions of visionary or metaphorical material, into a film that is circumscribed by a bleak, objective viewpoint. The unexpected effect, and intensity of Keitel’s acting, elevates ‘Bad Lieutenant’ to a level of profound seriousness. This ‘hallucination’ offers no ethical certainty or answer to the character’s problem. But the movie questions our instinct to condemn him, and asks us to look beyond the self-hatred and squalid dissolution inherent to his downward spiral.

‘One must love humanity in order to reach into the unique essence of each individual: no one can be too low or too ugly’ – Georg Büchner (from ‘Lenz’, 1836).

Anna Manni (actress, Asia Argento), a police woman, experiences a series of hallucinations – beginning in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence – in the presence of art objects (Illustration 1).

Illustration 1.

They seem to activate a latent psychosis: her personality begins to merge with that of a serial rapist and killer, whom she first pursues, and is then attacked by. Anna takes up painting herself, in an attempt to probe the psychopath’s mind, but this results in a mental breakdown. In one scene, the detective frustratedly and chaotically smears her body with paint (Illustration 2).

Illustration 2.

‘Stendhal’s syndrome’ is a controversial disorder, named by Graziella Magherini (an Italian psychiatrist) in 1979, after an account written by a 19th c. author, Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle). The film, ‘The Stendhal Syndrome’, questions the notion that art is safe and benign. It also suggests that art appreciation may not be universal between individuals: Anna’s sensitivity is so great she hears sounds evoked by paintings. At first we follow her, objectively, situated amongst and set against artworks. Argento subtly shifts our perspective, however, so that, as observers, we begin to share her line-of-sight (Illustration 3).

Illustration 3.

This culminates in the character symbolically ‘stepping into’ a picture-frame, with the viewer accompanying her (Illustration 4).

Illustration 4.

I think, here, there’s an underlying belief in a multi-dimensional artistic perspective: art is not merely an attractive object, but a doorway to a heightened level of awareness.