January Art «

January Art

Sunday 5th February 2023

The public side of January was Art. Lucien Freud was at the National Gallery. The early work – its extraordinary texture, like fine cloth, intensely present yet, like porcelain, breakable. He went on in this way. Even with broader brushstrokes, incredibly delicate and purposeful. Awful to say, Winslow Homer in the same National Gallery was a liberation after Lucien. Variety. Quite a few duds, but the good ones thrilling – the man scything the corn, Who could forget that? Dressing for the Carnival, sumptuous yet tragedy lurking somehow. Winslow saw glamour at awful moments as in the painting of the Confederate surrender. The star is the hot captured soldier, slouching provocatively. The label said ‘Defiance: provoking a shot before Petersburg’ was Winslow’s only Civil War painting but there were two Civil War paintings in the show and of course many more not there. A muscular black man on a boat was said by the label to be ‘fetish-ised’. But Winslow liked big strapping blond men too, as was all too apparent.

The London Art Fair had no Winslows for sale. Some Lucien Freud etchings were so heavy and dark. There are three of them, the titans of modern British art, Lucien, Francis Bacon and another called Auberbach. Francis Bacon was massive at the Royal Academy last year. It’s not so much that he was plainly quite weird in himself. The chiaroscuro rendering of the contorted blocks of body parts just isn’t very interesting as painting. It’s what anybody would do given some oil paint and a canvas – try to do shading and scrape it. Otherwise you’ve got those vast plains of rather horrid colour, often nylon pink. It must have been very difficult to get it on so smoothly, I will give him that.

The London Art Fair showed how much has to be sifted out. Two Winifred Nicholsons were gorgeous. Hockney was only minimally present, an etching glimpsed perhaps but enough. He is the greatest. It’s becoming clearer and clearer with every day that passes.