‘Sigmund would have loved this’ – Lucian Freud: The Painter and his Family review

Freud Museum, London
The painter’s sex life drove his art. Does this show think that’s too vulgar to go into? The result is richly ironic: a case of repression in the building that houses Sigmund’s consulting couch

Three generations meet in Sigmund Freud’s study at 20 Maresfield Gardens, London. Lucian Freud’s painting of his mother, Lucie, hangs over his grandfather’s famous consulting couch. The woman lies as if floating in space, eyes closed, arms up in a gesture of surrender. Curator Martin Gayford, who knew Lucian Freud and was portrayed by him, says the painter had Freudian “mother issues”. Not because she was strict but because she wasn’t. A Weimar liberal who believed in radical parenting, she rewarded him for being wild and delinquent. And he resented her for it.

As Freudian secrets go, this is an anecdote rather than a deep dive. And Freud’s 1970s painting of his mum reveals no hint of either antagonism or adoration. It strives for utter objectivity, focusing as calmly on her patterned dress as on her time-furrowed flesh. We are facts, says Freud: we breathe, we copulate, we die. This painting, like all his paintings, just wants to look existence in the eye, to see his mother in her physical reality. After a while I sensed bones and organs under the dress. This is what art is for, Freud tells us: to preserve some trace of our existence. Just that.

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