Freud earned greatness through stubborn tenacity

LUCIAN Freud, who has died at 88, was one of those rare artists who periodically remind us that greatness is achieved only through single-minded, even stubborn, integrity.

LUCIAN Freud, who has died at 88, was one of those rare artists who periodically remind us that greatness is achieved only through single-minded, even stubborn, integrity.

Like our own Jeffrey Smart, Freud had to contend with the chorus line of the art world chanting in unison, first that abstraction was the future of painting, then that painting was dead, and finally that it was all right to paint again as long as you painted badly or ironically.

Through all this, Freud persisted in a radically unfashionable project. The early Boy with a white scarf (1949), acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1950, is not only a beautiful painting, but almost insolently defiant of contemporary aesthetic ideology: the young model looks straight through the art establishment's new clothes.

It was some years, however, before an Australian gallery acquired another important painting by Freud. In 1984 the Art Gallery of Western Australia demonstrated real vision in buying one of his masterpieces, Naked man with a rat (1977-78). The spreadeagled pose of the reclining model and his conspicuous genitalia, together with the rat he holds in his left hand, are still too much for some viewers, and a gallery trustee is said to have resigned in protest.

The work may be confronting, but it is too serious to be merely provocative. The attitude comes from the equally ungracious posture of the Hellenistic sculpture known as the Barberini Faun (today in the Munich Glyptothek). It was adopted partly because Freud painted so slowly -- often over hundreds of hours -- that he was virtually obliged to allow his models to lie down. Here the stunned boredom of the young man's expression is turned into an existential gaze into vacancy.

In 2001 the National Gallery in Canberra paid the enormous sum of $7.4 million for After Cezanne (1999-2000). This was a logical acquisition for the national collection, which already owned the strangely clumsy early figure composition by Cezanne to which Freud here pays homage: L'apres-midi a Naples (c. 1875). Freud echoes the awkwardness of his model, even to the extent of tacking on an extra piece of canvas and framing the work accordingly.

Cezanne's figures of a man and a woman in a Neapolitan brothel are characteristically replaced by painstakingly rendered portraits: the male subject is his son Freddy.

Instead of careless sensuality, Freud evokes the sheer inertia and physicality of the body, with its burden of mortality, increasingly the theme of his later work; and Freddy leans his head on his hand as though in melancholy or in mourning.