Girl with Leaves: Lucian Freud at the MOMA

This past week, instead of ruminating on my New Year's resolution options, (to be more patient), I thought about modern conventions I was thankful for.  Day after day, the same lightening bolt hit me: modern plumbing. Not the Bisazza tile-lined sleek modern bathrooms of design porn, just the wonderful ease of a working toilet and hot shower. I don't know why this seemed to trump open heart surgery or Google, but it seemed like a huge quality of life issue I needed to be thankful for, and happy that the days of my gramma's out house are long gone.
     Monday, resolution in head, I ran to the Museum of Modern Art to catch the raved about Seurat show before it closed.  While everyone I know found it to be jaw droppingly beautiful, instead I fell in love with an unlikely contender; Lucian Freud's etchings.  Not a huge fan of Freud's prickly paintings, or etchings in general, I wasn't supposed to love this show.  
     The exhibit includes early paintings, perhaps as a reference point to the starkness the etchings conjure, that are fantastically odd.  Very cold and other worldly, especially when compared to his thickly painted, more contemporary work, Girl with Leaves, is fabulous.  The icy black and white etchings, enlivened by Freud's scratches and sputters, talk more about post World War II malaise than many realist painters of his era.  Francis Bacon is my fave Brit painter of this mid 20th century period.  I adore the way he works the canvas vs. reality conflict  into a fever through color and composition.  Freud is not going into any of those dark corners here, but the space between the etching lines whispers more than his tubes of paint usually can.
 

Comments

[Mike Lupica]

Wow, I had the exact same reaction when I went to a Lucian Freud exhibit about 15 years ago! He paints very fat people with true panache.