British art invaded New York this
spring. The three-pronged attack
was mounted not by the YBAs responsible for the adolescent tantrums in
Brooklyn last year, but by a group of seasoned painters, all over
seventy, all with distinguished track records: Lucian Freud, Leon
Kossoff, and Craigie Aitchison, in order of their familiarity to
audiences on this side of the Atlantic. The three shows overlapped by
accident rather than by design, it seems, but the coincidence probably
made all of them more provocative than they would have been in
isolation. Seeing recent works by Freud, Kossoff, and Aitchison in
fairly close proximity offered opportunities for interesting comparisons
and suggested even more interesting questions about individuality and
the Britishness of British art.
Freud was last seen here in some depth in 1996, in concurrent exhibitions
at Acquavella and the Metropolitan.
I confess to mixed feelings about Freud’s
work. His recent efforts[1]
(the show included about thirty large and
small canvases, plus some etchings, all executed between 1997 and 2000)
seemed more convincing than his earlier massive, meaty nudes, but while
the works at Acquavella
could fascinate, they also irritated; they
demanded serious, prolonged attention, but they were frequently
downright exasperating.
Freud’s pictures draw you in, despite his perhaps calculated,
perhaps inadvertent efforts to repulse you. His works are often so
deliberately uningratiating, so unappealing to the eye, that they seem
designed to push you away. It’s the diametric opposite of the quality
Michael Fried attributes to Courbet’s