National Portrait Gallery, London
Freud was a master painter, but his drawings ranged from ordinary to awful. Guess which aspect of his work this show focuses on?
If painting is a fast car, drawing is more like taking the bus. At least that’s how it felt to me, puttering along on the 27 to Paddington that is the National Portrait Gallery’s trawl through Lucian Freud’s sketches, engravings and even childhood crayonings, daydreaming until my stop, with the occasional flash of colour and flare when one of the exhibition’s “carefully selected group of important paintings” rolled past.
This is a sad review to write. Freud seemed an unquestionable genius in his lifetime and I still stand in awe of the great modern paintings with which he won that crown. One of his 1990s portraits of “Benefits Supervisor” Sue Tilley towers here, in every sense, her face slumped into her hand as she sleeps vertical in an armchair, while Freud eagerly inspects every pore and blemish on her big naked body and translates her into an ecstasy of oily greys, whites, purples, ridged, pockmarked, magnificent.
