Small Figure

'I want paint to work as flesh... I have always had a scorn for 'la belle peinture' and 'la delicatesse des touches'. I know my idea of portraiture came from dissatisfaction with portraits that resembled people. I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them. I didn't want to get just a likeness like a mimic, but to portray them, like an actor. As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does' (L. Freud quoted in L. Gowing, Lucian Freud, London 1982, pp. 190-191).



Painted between 1983-1984, Small Figure is an exquisitely rendered portrait of a woman, dating from a pivotal moment in the artist's career. It was during this period in the early 1980s that Freud carried out some of his greatest works, culminating in his widely acknowledged masterpiece Large Interior W11 (After Watteau) (1981-1983). Small Figure is perhaps best understood as a counterpoint to this large scale depiction of close family and friends. Working on both paintings in close conjunction, Freud was enjoying the freedom afforded by radically different scales. In Small Figure he imbues the sitter with a remarkable intensity, the intimate scale creating a deeply charged atmosphere. Lying in repose, legs gently drawn apart, she is captured deep in a private moment of intense reflection. The woman's figure presses up suggestively against the edges of the canvas, her long legs disappearing into some imaginary space beyond the picture plane. In these contemporary works, Freud perfected his marriage of impasto and observation, translating the expression and almost tangible physicality of his sitters to canvas. As Lawrence Gowing once described, Freud was able to animate the figure with an unparalleled sense of 'living volume' (L. Gowing quoted in Lucian Freud, London 1982, p. 118), a skill that has secured his place as one of the preeminent figurative painters of the twentieth century.

Her voluptuous figure is laid bare to the eye, the viewer scanning the soft flesh of her thighs, the rounded contours of her bust and midriff. As Walter Sickert once suggested, 'perhaps the chief source of pleasure in the aspect of a nude, is that it is in the nature of a gleam - a gleam of light and warmth and life' (W. Sickert quoted in W. Feaver, Lucian Freud, New York 2007, p. 22). In Small Figure Freud has achieved this with prodigious skill. Through his mastery of impasto oil paint, he has lent the figure a heady sensuality and vivid animation, her latent body heat rising up from her flushed skin. Wedges of light fall across the woman's figure, the artist creating a chiaroscuro effect with broad and rich brushstrokes. He highlights the hilt of her bosom, the top of her bare shoulder and the peak of her high cheekbone, whilst casting the crook of her arm, her broad chest and most private recesses into shadow. Her face has been depicted with relative delicacy, yet it is clearly less the focus of Freud's attention than the majestic bosom or the bountiful waist; as Freud himself once said, 'I used to leave the face until last. I wanted the expression to be in the body. The head must be just another limb. So I had to play down expression in nudes' (L. Freud quoted in R. Hughes, 'On Lucian Freud', Lucian Freud Paintings, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1988, p. 20).

Early in his career, Herbert Read had celebrated Freud as the 'Ingres of existentialism', his works demonstrating the refined line, smooth flatness and even illumination of the neo-classical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. His technique began to radically transform in the late 1950s however, with Woman Smiling (1958-1959) achieving a new and remarkable plasticity of form. Over the next thirty years Freud refined this method, building up his use of impasto to the concentrated, sculptural aesthetic that is evident in Small Figure. In the painting, the artist's brushstrokes have a vigorous, gestural quality reminiscent of his artistic heroes Rembrandt, Franz Hals, Gustave Courbet and Théodore Géricault. Employing a coarse hog-hair brush and oils, Freud appears to have carved out the very flesh of the sitter, an effect that is seen as one of the artist's hallmarks.

Throughout his career, Freud often returned to familiar lovers, friends and family as his subjects, feeling uncomfortable with the lack of intimacy and cool distance that professionalism can create. As he explained, 'if you don't know them, it can only be like a travel book' (L. Freud quoted in L. Gowing, Lucian Freud, London, 1982, p. 56). In Small Figure, Freud has guarded his subject's identity, yet there is a patent familiarity and intimacy that exists between the two, her relaxed, unselfconscious pose suggesting a condition of mutual trust. The elusive sitter reappears in works such as Naked Woman on a Sofa (1984-1985) painted around the same moment. As Bruce Bernard so eloquently concluded, 'the essence of his 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' (B. Bernard quoted in B. Bernard & D. Birdsall (eds.), Lucian Freud, London 1996, p. 12).

Working directly from life, Freud would often demand that his subjects endure long sittings of four to six hours at a time for a period of up to a year. As he once averred, 'I'm very conscious of whether I've got a naked man or woman in front of me. Sometimes I can't stop. Like those cars that get so hot that when you turn the engine off it goes on banging away' (L. Freud quoted in W. Feaver, Lucian Freud, New York 2007, p. 22). He studied each inch of the figure, every idiosyncrasy of the body with an unparalleled gaze. In doing so, he created a unique, organic work whose surface might be considered an environment or landscape in its own right. The paint surface has a tangible almost sculptural quality to it, for as Freud once elaborated, 'I want paint to work as flesh... I have always had a scorn for 'la belle peinture' and 'la delicatesse des touches.' I know my idea of portraiture came from dissatisfaction with portraits that resembled people. I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them. I didn't want to get just a likeness like a mimic, but to portray them, like an actor. As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does' (L. Freud quoted in L. Gowing, Lucian Freud, London 1982, pp. 190-191).