Lucian Freud – New Perspectives review: A strangely subdued exhibition

This blockbuster show is out to rescue Freud the artist from Freud the celebrity – but the results are mixed

‘Bella and Esther’, Lucian Freud, 1988 (© The Lucian Freud Archive/Bridgeman Images)

I’ll let you in on a secret: I’m not the world’s greatest Lucian Freud fan. In fact, to cut to the chase, I can’t stand Lucian Freud. I was prepared to believe the National Gallery’s new exhibition might change that view. But frankly, I wasn’t holding my breath.

His art is grindingly repetitive, with human flesh, clothes, furniture and – always dingy – rooms reduced over decades to the same set of clammy, clay-like textures and brown-dominated colours. It’s safe to say that, as a human being, he’s not my type: a snobbish slummer in low life, and let’s not even start on his attitude to women. But what really gets my goat about Freud is the mystifying regard in which he’s held by the British public. Eleven years on from his death, he’s still endlessly referred to as “our greatest painter” or even “the greatest British artist of the 20th century”. There’s a weird deference in this view, as though being charismatic and posh somehow entitled him to greatness – and being Sigmund Freud’s nephew didn’t do any harm.

We Brits like to think of ourselves as individualistic and creative, with an instinctive for the cutting edge – from The Beatles and the YBAs to grime music. But the popularity of Freud’s fundamentally conservative art attests to the fact that the British are happiest when things are comfortingly old-fashioned. Freud’s take on traditional oil painting comes with a twist, of course: it flatters the viewer into thinking that they’re taking risks, embracing moral discomfort. But the person feeling the moral discomfort should, in my opinion, be Freud himself.