"If painting is a fast car, drawing is more like taking the bus. At least that's how it felt to me, puttering along on the 27 to Paddington that is the National Portrait Gallery's trawl through Lucian Freud's sketches, engravings and even childhood crayonings, daydreaming until my stop, with the occasional flash of colour and flare when one of the exhibition's carefully selected group of important paintings rolled past."
"Freud seemed an unquestionable genius in his lifetime and I still stand in awe of the great modern paintings with which he won that crown. One of his 1990s portraits of Benefits Supervisor Sue Tilley towers here, in every sense, her face slumped into her hand as she sleeps vertical in an armchair, while Freud eagerly inspects every pore and blemish on her big naked body and translates her into an ecstasy of oily greys, whites, purples, ridged, pockmarked, magnificent."
The exhibition brings together Lucian Freud's sketches, engravings and childhood crayonings with a small group of major paintings. Some paintings, notably a 1990s portrait of Benefits Supervisor Sue Tilley, demonstrate intense scrutiny of flesh and remarkable painterly achievement. A large portion of the prints and drawings read as mediocre or awful, lacking the niftiness and daring evident in the paintings. Faces and bodies in the etchings are often defined with matted, heavily shaded edges that seem precious and laborious, at best resembling posters. Two prints of Tilley read like adverts for the artist. A 1985 etching, Man Posing, is explicitly obscene.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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