“It was a very memorable and enjoyable experience. I thought his portrait very good indeed – all the hours I sat were layered into it; he had always added, rarely taken anything away. It really shows”
Painted in 2002 at the very zenith of the artist’s career, Lucian Freud’s portrait of David Hockney embodies a meeting of two eminent masters: locked in observation of each other, here two artistic Titans are forever imbricated within the thickly impastoed layers of Freud’s masterful brushstrokes. In this fascinating portrait, created in the months leading up to the artist’s critically-acclaimed retrospective at Tate Britain, Freud magnificently captures a private exchange between artist and sitter, and in doing so, succeeds in grasping the pure essence of his subject; a feat that lies at the very core of his greater oeuvre, in which the most important people in his life were subjected to meticulous observation and translation in paint. Chronicling an extraordinary moment in t.mes , this portrait speaks to the shared history and mutual respect between two illustrious artists in equally important.mes asure. Freud’s portrait of Hockney unassailably broadcasts the hallmarks of two twentieth-century legends.
Private collects ion
Image/ Artwork: © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images
In this peer-to-peer portrayal, Freud echoes other great artistic relationships that have been recorded in paint by the masters of art history: one thinks of Amadeo Modigliani’s Portrait of Pablo Picasso (1915), Paul Gaugin’s Van Gogh painting Sunflowers (1888), Camille Pissarro’s Portrait of Cézanne (1874), Francis Bacon’s many studies of Freud himself and even Andy Warhol’s David Hockney (1974). Freud’s fascination with portraiture is restricted solely to those closest to him, his everyday life, and the places he is familiar with. He declared that “I work from people that interest.mes , and that I care about and think about, in rooms that I live and know” (Lucian Freud quoted in: John Russell, Lucian Freud, London 1974, p. 13). Be they self-portraits, or portraits of friends, lovers, criminals, members of the aristocracy and notably, as in the present work, other artists – for example, Francis Bacon (1952), Frank Auerbach (1975-76) and the present David Hockney – Freud only painted the significant protagonists in the crucible of his life. Within the entirety of Freud’s oeuvre only a small percentage of works were given titles identifying their subject by name. So, it is of no small significance that the present painting names its sitter with such deliberate emphasis.
Artists by Artists
If Freud, as Robert Hughes once declared, was the world’s ‘greatest living realist painter’ then it is the single-figure subject that best affords the artist the opportunity of displaying his unquestionably masterful ability to capture the mood and the inner essence of his sitters. Freud’s genius is to present in his work the totality of the self in all its complex variations, and, as Bruce Bernard wrote, “The essence of [Freud’s]… genius in the perception of human beings is felt most keenly when he has asked one person who interests him, both in look and character, to submit to his scrutiny and help him realise their truest possible image in paint” (Bruce Bernard, Lucian Freud, New York 1996, p. 12). In this respect, David Hockney is an exquisite test.mes nt to the superlative power of Lucian Freud’s preoccupation with the single-figure portrait.
“It’s to do with the feeling of individuality and the intensity of the regard and the focus on the specific. So I think portraiture is an attitude.”
Tate, London
Image: © Tate London
Artwork: © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images
Right: Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, 1975-76
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Image/ Artwork: © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images
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This portrait provides a fascinating window into the narrative of a long episodic friendship that had started forty years before, culminating in what Hockney calculated as more than a hundred hours of sittings over four months in the summer of 2002. Every day Hockney would walk through Holland Park to Freud’s flat: “somet.mes s I was early, and he would leap up the stairs two at a t.mes . No slouch at eighty. He never wanted to be seen as inactive” (David Hockney cited in: Geordie Greig, Breakfast with Lucian, London 2013, p. 89). Arriving around 08:30 each morning, the sittings started, exceedingly British in nature, with a cup of tea brewed by Freud on a grease-covered stove. Hockney recalled, “I liked the old-fashioned bohemia of it all. The plates with old beans on them from the last night, or even last week, it was like student days, very appealing, very appealing after all those very clean New York lofts. I told him you can’t have a smoke-free bohemia by definition. He let.mes smoke – ‘Don’t tell Kate Moss’ was his request” (Ibid.).
Image: © David Dawson, (b.1960) / Private collects ion / Bridgeman Images. Artwork: © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images
On the surface, the two artists appear fundamentally different; Freud, confining himself day-in day-out to paint within the four walls of his studio; and Hockney the constant traveller, ever changing and challenging his methods and mediums – moving restlessly from drawing, painting, photography to his current digital work on iPads. Yet at the very heart of both their practices is the unwavering fascination with finding ways to paint exactly what they see. Familiar to both artists is the essential principal that observation, perception and the process of creation is just as important, if not more, than the final picture. Thus, the sittings provided a meeting of minds that spanned forty years of shared admiration. For Hockney it was an illuminating experience: “I was fascinated with his technique. At t.mes s, I thought he might have pre-mixed colours to speed it up for me, but I quickly realised he wouldn’t do that as he wanted as much t.mes as possible. Because of this we could talk. Lucian’s talk was always fascinating. Somet.mes s it was just gossip about people we both knew, very amusing, very good put-downs that made me laugh. But we talked about drawing a lot. Rembrandt, Picasso, Ingres, Tiepolo, I remember he didn’t like Morandi. We talked a lot about Rembrandt drawings and how everything he did is a portrait, no hand or face is generic” (Ibid.). The portrait proceeded throughout the Spring and Summer and by July it was just about finished except for Hockney’s glasses. Finally, Freud added, there was just the last touch to be captured and conveyed: “That he’s talking’” (Lucian Freud cited in: William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame. 1968-2011, London 2020, p. 421).
“It was a visually arresting scene from Sweeney Todd. Freud’s grip on the paintbrush was sabre-like and his concentration unwavering throughout.”
Image/Artwork: © David Dawson / Bridgeman Images
One sitting was brilliantly captured on camera by David Dawson. In one image, we see Hockney wearing an expression almost identical to the one caught in Freud’s painting, whilst Freud, mid-stride, enters the studio, brushes in hand. In this instance, Dawson anticipated Freud’s apparent surprise on re-entering the studio to find a camera pointed at him while Hockney was waiting, ashtray at his feet, matching the talkative expression of his portrait. Dawson’s photograph shows Freud amid dozens of torn white rags splattered with paint. “Dressed in a splattered white ‘apron’ over his trousers he looked more like a worker at an abattoir, next to the dandyish younger artist. It was a visually arresting scene from Sweeney Todd. Freud’s grip on the paintbrush was sabre-like and his concentration unwavering throughout” (Geordie Greig, Breakfast with Lucian, op. cit.). This mise en scène perfectly encapsulates the uncompromising analysis and palpable frisson that Freud so successfully translated into paint: “It’s to do with the feeling of individuality and the intensity of the regard and the focus on the specific. So I think portraiture is an attitude” (Lucian Freud in: Mark Holborn and David Dawson, Lucian Freud: A Life, London 2019, p. 214).
Image/ Artwork: © David Dawson / Bridgeman Images
The resulting portrait shows Hockney’s face close up, in thoughtful repose, revealing his warmth and inquisitiveness. Hockney wears a jaunty red and black checked jacket and a cerulean blue shirt (“He liked a particular jacket and a blue shirt. I always wore them. I was fascinated to see his methods”). His face dominates the canvas, peering over his round spectacles- almost as if he were the artist looking at his subject. It is an extraordinary portrait, extoling a sublime display of Freud's painterly control: the facetted planes of colour shift through a tonal spectrum which lends form, while a flurry of brushstrokes forges a physical topography that describes the contours of the sitter’s face. It is loaded with physicality and vigorous paint application: swathes of umber and sienna brushwork pack the canvas with an explosive energy. The format of this painting evokes memories of the intimate and meticulous paintings of the early 1950s; yet, unlike the corporeal textures and the refined variations in colour of delicate flesh particular to his earlier works, the thick impastoed surface of the present painting offers a more tactile reality. Sebastian Smee has noted of this period, “Everything one feels in front of Freud’s paintings has to do with the means by which it is conveyed – the paint. He can pack more energy and specifically anchored imagination into a few square inches of brushwork than anyone alive. There is no rational formulation behind the congeries of brushstrokes that constitutes the head portrait. Somehow, it all coheres to produce an intensified reality. The result puts across something of the subject’s intelligence and discretion, perhaps even its modesty” (Sebastien Smee, Lucian Freud: Recent Work 1996-2005, London 2005, p. 7).
Like all the truly great portrait artists, from Dürer, to Rembrandt, to Bacon, Freud had an uncompromising ability to excavate every peculiarity of a person to reveal an incommunicable essence that speaks directly to the viewer. In this captivating portrait Freud achieves this intangible character, a trait he had described as early as 1954: “The picture in order to move us must never merely remind us of life, but must acquire a life of its own, precisely in order to reflect life” (Lucian Freud cited in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Lucian Freud, 2002 p. 15). Freud was almost 80 years old when he began the present work, and he had already achieved almost all that one could as an artist. His coterie of sitters and subjects was similarly illustrious: to name only two, Queen Elizabeth II and Kate Moss were painted the year prior to Hockney. At this moment in his career, Freud was Britain’s greatest living painter, and was about to embark on another major museum retrospective. However, even in the face of such plaudits, Freud refused to succumb to a late style; he refused to allow his works to soften or loosen and refused to lighten his burden of work. The present portrait is test.mes nt to this refusal. Its urgency, subtlety, concision, and grace recall the assessment of his work made by artistic peer and confidant Frank Auerbach in 2002: “I think of Lucian’s attention to his subject. If his concentrated interest were to falter he would come off the tightrope; he has no safety net of manner. Whenever his way of working threatens to become a style, he puts it aside like a blunted pencil… The paintings live because their creator has been passionately attentive to their theme, and his attention has left something for us to look at. It seems a sort of miracle” (Frank Auerbach cited in: William Feaver, op. cit., p. 51).
Seven Decades of the Single-Figure Portrait
Throughout his renowned career, Freud lived and translated his physical circumstances, experiences, and relationships into compositions that communicate the universal truths of human psychology and emotion. His corpus is replete with canvases that capture within their borders instances of intense intimacy and privacy; his work reads as a dedicated and minute study of personal human moments. As Hockney himself concluded: “It’s a duration, not a moment; not many people could look at a face for 120 hours and constantly do something with it” (David Hockney in: William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame. 1968-2011, London 2020, p. 421). Quite simply, David Hockney is a masterpiece; it is a penetrating portrait of a human relationship that speaks directly to the viewer; it is a sublime test.mes
nt to the very measure of Freud’s concentration and the transcendent effects he was able to capture in paint from prolonged periods of scrutiny. As plainly and succinctly put by Hockney himself: “It was a very memorable and enjoyable experience. I thought his portrait very good indeed – all the hours I sat were layered into it; he had always added, rarely taken anything away. It really shows” (David Hockney in: Evening Standard, 22 July 2011, online).