Getting to grips with naked - Page 5
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 22: MoneySexPower
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Barry Hill
SPEAKING OF UGLINESS – WHICH OUR BARE BODIES have to live with in all manner of ways, especially as we age, or let ourselves slip, creating an argument with our bodies at different times of our lives, perhaps all our lives in some cases – Freud has magnificently transcended ugliness. The celebrated case is his subject, Sue Tilley, who is huge. And the great paintings of her are so fully addressed that they are another unprecedented achievement by Freud, as no other artist has taken such a subject upon himself. Admittedly there is an air of social condescension in Freud naming her in paintings as the ‘Benefits Supervisor'. But before long everyone in London knew her name as distinct from her social rank, and Freud was on record as revelling in painting her with all her blotches and contortions – ‘flesh without muscle' which had ‘developed a different kind of texture through being such a weight-bearing thing'.
The result is humbling. Stand awhile with the paintings of big Sue and you overcome the banality of her being ‘fat'. The fact of ‘fat' gets lost in the fullness of her individual presence, the way she inhabits her body with such a power of acceptance, affirmation. Her individual and unique body, I mean – not some Rubenesque torso offered as a defiance of the Greek ideal, which she shows up as a kind of cock-eyed departure from reality. The paintings of her are straightforwardly, unapologetically there, as the woman in them is there in her own life. Maybe, at some deep level, her massive female figure resonates like those prehistoric fertility sculptures. But mainly the feeling generated by Freud is closer to the atmosphere that belongs to Rembrandt's larger women, an addition to the history of Humanism. Once I got over the initial squirms of being with Tilley, I found I was writing poems which adopted what I imagined to be her voice – a mark of otherness that no other Freud painting had prompted in me. It's a chirpy cognisant voice at one with itself in the artist's studio and in tune with the magnanimity that Freud brings to his creaturely human presences:
how should I place my whole weight
the weight I am when glutinously
askew from the afternoon, loosened
for war's end? How can one be at ease
seen from three angles: no benefits there
though he pays me, pays me fair ...
(Evening in the Studio, 1993)
FOR SOME TIME, ACTUALLY, Magnanimity was the working title of my book of poems. Freud is possibly some kind of closing chapter in the long modern history of rendering the body naked in defiance of ideal forms. His bodies remind us that it takes some doing to appraise ourselves truthfully in public, so to speak. We learnt to do so via various causes celebres, well-known signposts in art history – the 1868 scandal over Manet's Olympia, for example, which ushered in the direct gaze of the carnal lower orders – and the slow seepage of the sexually commonplace, such as Walter Sickert's Camden Town series, in which plump naked tarts loll on beds in seedy rooms, the iron bedrails as much a statement of reality as the glimpse a painting might offer of the fully dressed gentleman caller. Sickert's work is as psychologically frank as it is graphically – taking his cue from his mentor Degas, who painted in the shadow of Rodin at his most explicit. This point came home to me a couple of years after the Freud retrospective at the Tate, while I was still trying to code the arrival of his naked bodies, the journey they had made along the byways and highways of art history.
The exhibition that soon followed Freud at the Tate was the judicious Degas, Sickert & Toulouse-Lautrec: London & Paris 1870-1910. The ideal forms of Venus were very much on the minds of painters such as Sickert and Bonnard, referenced in various ways, the better to usurp them with more explicit realities. The quintessentially explicit was provided by the sculptural forms of Rodin, most conspicuously with Iris, the fragment of a torso where the girl's legs are wide open. The curators at the Tate put Iris at the centre of the exhibition. The torso functions, as a catalogue essay put it, almost like a ‘mute, de-anthropomorphised face', and the fragmentation intensifies the ‘boldness and frankness of the female genitalia'. Sickert painted foreshortened woman as if they were sculptural fragments, and his L'Affaire de Camden Town is a natural companion to Iris: as one of the curators remarks, it's as if he has popped Iris into bed. But there is an important difference. Rodin names Iris a Messenger of the Gods, and there is no suggestion of a god in anything Sickert painted. His rooms are what they are: bare of belief, pregnant only with a kind of sour carnality.
And so it can be with Freud. Most often, he leaves sex out of it, offering us figures whose sexual temperature is so low that we take a look and forget all about it – a depressing reminder of what our bodies might become, in their sad, due course. The sourness, then, is in the rooms Freud paints, the floors bare, the tap dripping in a stained sink. When Freud does sex, the atmosphere is no brighter: think of the big painting Australians now know at first hand, After Cezanne, which hangs in the National Gallery. The painting shows a naked threesome: a man and a women on a bed, awkwardly turned away from each other as a second woman enters the room carrying cups on a tray. Everything signals misery and estrangement and you can't help feeling, apropos of the painting, that Freud has taken pleasure in its studied ugliness. In aesthetic terms, it is well and truly after Cezanne. The original that inspired Freud is a gem of mysterious erotic enthusiasm.
At the risk of stating the obvious, Freud's defiance of the ideal forms applies to men as well as women. In the history of the explicit, it is easy to remain preoccupied with the female figure and to muse, in a John Berger-esque way, about capitalism and the construction of the male gaze. But this only goes so far. It doesn't touch the atmosphere created by Freud's sustained treatment of both men and women, often in each other's company, each done with equal candour, with every body scrutinised all over, genitals and all – the ‘all', in the final analysis, being the thing.
Perhaps what is most naked about his figures is their isolation from each other. One person's body is usually turned away from the other. They seldom meet each other's gazes – or the painter's or ours either. It would be a relief to be able to say that Freud's sitters are turned inwards. But that is not the feeling at all. Rather they seem to be asleep, and not just because the painter has given them permission to be so, since they must, on average, sit for a total of eighty hours. There is something abandoned about them, as if they have come to the end of the line ...
They dream oases
having come a long way
baked in an earlier light
and now settled, in some shade.
No salt, a few wizened dates ...
The mirror is cracked.
Dance has left the belly
(Oasis)
Twenty years ago, Robert Hughes wrote a splendid essay on Freud in which he remarked that, for all the angularities and nakedness, ‘they (the paintings) bypass decorum while fiercely preserving respect'. True. It is what comes through after the registrations of gender and genitals have taken place and the larger truths start to seep in, truths that put his bodies out of the realm of desire. The terms ‘realist' or ‘realism' don't easily summarise those truths, by the way. Freud has never had any realist program, as did Courbet. And, as Sebastian Smee has pointed out, there is a theatrical streak in his work that flouts realism. Freud himself speaks of ‘revelation'.
‘When I look at a body I know it gives me choices of what to put in a painting: what will suit me and what won't. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.'
As a result, and as Hughes points out, ‘The body is new every time.'
Found and refound as new, time after time.
For most of his life, Freud has worked all day and half the night, concentrating on several pictures at once, needing his subjects to sit for weeks and months at a time, developing what he calls a ‘concourse' between himself and them, arranging them in a studio he himself hardly steps out of, and to which he is almost regressively attached – as we can see from the paintings that show the encrustations of paint on the walls and on the floors, littered as they are with the soiled rags from his brushes, rags that pile up around his easel and his subjects, the interminable signs of toil and pleasure taken in the presence of bodies we recognise as belonging to a unique sector of London life at a certain epoch in its history, obviously, but which also draw our attention to ourselves, whoever we are in our naked and uniquely Western and material bodies, like them or not.
The point is: this is what Freud has been making for himself and for us. What he has been seeking is some truth of bodies in all their forms, in their essence, which must always elude him, as he has gone on being an archetypal procreational self. A poet might be forgiven for adopting the voice of a painter. My book's last poem is called Alchemy:
Paint of my flesh
flesh that is yours,
more paint, more that is yours
in my painterly hands.
My hand along your brow
your brow guiding my hand,
my thoughts at your throat
your throat showing me how.
My flesh, your flesh,
ours to the touch,
the matter at hand alchemy
a distance from us.
Yet oddly close to me
my memory, my loves –
the gleamings, slippery trust,
the heat in the brush
and my self-caress
its boundlessness, its
tautological finesse.
Wedding after wedding in pigment.
Pure stone to pure stone.
The fire out of lead.
The whole burning white.
A hole in my head.
A heart crossed with itself
from beginning to end,
fist over fist
a finish begins again.
Umbilical rainbows,
a placenta as palette,
the smearing and honouring
of kith and kin,
etchings of angels
I won't let in.
Such is the wonder
the full spectrum
of my cell's birthing,
nursery returning, a crib
(coagulations, emissions) –
a crucible fundamental. ♦