nude art portraits
extremepainter
Contact
Ian Pearson
ianpe...@thesacredvoicegallery.com
Gallery site
http://www.thesacredvoicegallery.com/gallery.htm
Tristán White
(extremepainter) wrote:
Watched that programme last night about Lucien Freud.
I love art, particularly modern art, but whilst I can appreciate he's
a great painter, I really don't like his stuff. And how can anyone
make a body, nude or otherwise, look so ugly. When they interviewed
some of his subjects, you realised how pretty some of them were.
Lucien even makes his young granddaughter look as though she has a
serious disfigurement.
I mean, fair enough, it's good art..... but is it something you would
ever want hanging on your wall?
Journalist-North
"Tristán White" <Trista...@rocketmail.com> wrote in message
news:0ubgc0d00etpg2ht5...@4ax.com...
>
> Watched that programme last night about Lucien Freud.
>
> I love art, particularly modern art, but whilst I can appreciate he's
> a great painter, I really don't like his stuff. And how can anyone
> make a body, nude or otherwise, look so ugly. When they interviewed
> some of his subjects, you realised how pretty some of them were.
> Lucien even makes his young granddaughter look as though she has a
> serious disfigurement.
>
> I mean, fair enough, it's good art..... but is it something you would
> ever want hanging on your wall?
----------
You have to be one of the "lovvies" to understand it. The same kind of
mindset that believes Tracy Emon's "unmade bed"; and Damion Hurst's cut up
pickled sheep are not only art... but GREAT art. :-(
Frankly, I have a lot less trouble with Freud's work then the others because
at least his figures do look like a discernable representation of real human
people even if they are not literal images. But, like you, wouldn't
necessarily want to have one hanging on the wall of my hovel.
Journalist
CraigM
> Watched that programme last night about Lucien Freud.
>
> I love art, particularly modern art, but whilst I can appreciate he's
> a great painter, I really don't like his stuff. And how can anyone
> make a body, nude or otherwise, look so ugly. When they interviewed
> some of his subjects, you realised how pretty some of them were.
> Lucien even makes his young granddaughter look as though she has a
> serious disfigurement.
I wonder what modern art you love if you exclude all that which
presents the body in an unattractive way? Just thinking off the top of
my head, where modern art does feature the body, it is almost
exclusively - and deliberately - at odds with accepted ideas of
'beauty': the spindly figures of Giacometti, the cubist figures of
Picasso, the ugly and distorted figures of the Chapman brothers.
(About the only exception to this is in the paintings of John Currin
-but even he is self-consciously referring back to an earlier phase of
art history.) Surely the point here is that presentation of bodies in
a 'beautiful' way is unduly and unnecessarily restrictive and, well,
simply not interesting enough for contemporary art.
Like you, I found the documentary on Freud very interesting. But
strangely I don't find his paintings of bodies ugly in any sense -
certainly none featured on the programme itself. I'm always taken by
his pictures of Leigh Bowery (the fat, bald, gay performance artist
whom he painted on several occasions) in the way he can find some
notion of 'beauty' in even the least promising subjects. Ditto his
portrait of the middle-aged and overweight woman who Freud found
through Bowery when the latter was dying of AIDS. Unconventional
beauty it may be, but there is real power in the honest depiction of
real people with real bodies. (Rather like those brilliant self- and
other portraits by Stanley Spencer.)
>
> I mean, fair enough, it's good art..... but is it something you would
> ever want hanging on your wall?
If only I could afford it!