Lucian Freud, Robert Lenkiewicz
Article by Nahem Shoa

Lucian Freud and Robert Lenkiewicz are, in my opinion, two of the world’s greatest figurative artists who both chose to go in a direction completely opposite to the 20th century trends of abstraction and conceptual art.

Since the beginnings of Western Art, artists who painted the world just as they saw it, without flattery placed themselves unintentionally into the role of rebel or outsider. These artists went against the values of the Art Establishment that only adhered to the concept of the Classical Ideal and strove to make nature more perfect than it is. They preferred to idealise and paint only what was considered beautiful, detesting the artists who portrayed life as they saw it warts and all. The ability to dig deeper revealing the beauty in ugliness was dismissed as vulgar. So it comes as no surprise that many of the famous realist artists throughout history, who in their own time struggled for recognition are the artists today that are the most respected. Without Titian, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer, Velazquez, Goya, Constable, Courbet, Manet, Monet, etc, the history of painting would not amount to much. Let’s not forget that Freud only became world famous in his late 60’s and Lenkiewicz still has not received the fame that is due to him. Luckily for us history is usually very kind to these individual artists.

It would be impossible for any Jewish artist born before or around the time of the Second World War to make work that wasn’t profoundly affected deeply by that human nightmare, consciously or unconsciously. Freud and Lenkiewicz were affected directly with family killed in concentration camps, where over half the Jewish population were annihilated. I think it is no coincidence that both of these Artists were obsessed by the figure, and of making art that pulsated with life. Freud will go to incredible lengths to get a painting to work spending often hundreds of hours to finish a picture, restating each figure again and again in his canvas, in an attempt to make the paint become real flesh, life itself. Lenkiewicz painted hundreds of figures, sometimes in one canvas. Each year he painted up to five hundred people, almost wanting to over fill the studio with the living as a reaction to all those that died. He stated that all his projects have been an attempt to understand Fascism and how the individual can free himself from the limitation set by society.

Lenkiewicz was the only 20th century figurative painter able from a very young age to paint huge group figure canvases convincingly, very much in the French Romantic tradition of the early 19th century. The greatest pioneers in this discipline artists like David, Delacroix, Courbet and Gericault were great heroes of Lenkiewicz. Their grand scale paintings were referred to as ‘Grand Machines’. Lenkiewicz too had that 19th century ability to fit each figure into his large canvases with incredible lyricism, creating a perfect harmony between the figures and the background, which only a great draughtsman and colourist can do. His 3000 square foot mural of 1973 wouldn’t look out of place in the Lourve. Freud’s group figure canvases have always been just a few figures, no more than five. They sit together often in a stilted way, figures that are not conceived together as a whole. Although painted together at the same time, there is little emotional connection between them. It is partly Freud’s process of working each part of the body separately that leaves the final picture looking disjointed and only working brilliantly in a few parts.

If Picasso is the painter who reinvented the figure, then Freud will go down in history as the artist who reinvented flesh. Freud has found a completely new language of mark making. His eye penetrates so deeply into the model, like a surgeon’s scalpel enabling him to bring each limb to a monumental conclusion, that gives his best single figure paintings their greatness. He usually starts with the eye then, works each part to a finish, crawling over each wrinkle, wart, burst blood vessel and mapping out the body through its flaws. They are like each individuals personal diary expressed in flesh. It is this brutal matter of factness that shocks many viewers.

Lenkiewicz on the other hand has also painted difficult subject matter, vagrancy, mental handicap, death, sex and suicide and has approached this work with impartial objectivity. He gained a deep psychological insight into the world each sitter inhabits. A combination of conversations, and a vast amount of reading produced painting of a deeply thought provoking nature. Lenkiewicz painted people the rest of us would be terrified and repulsed by, stinking tramps, pimps, prostitutes, junkies, thieves and Murderers and yet still managed to look at humanity in a caring way, similar to that of Rembrandt. Both Lenkiewicz and Freud’s life’s work is about understanding the human condition.

For me Lenkiewicz’s greatest contribution to figurative painting, is his deep and penetrating research into colour, not in a pigment sense but in the way he translated the retinal experience onto canvas. His unmatched ability to break down tone and colour to a huge range of shades and hues allowed him to push his colour to a richness of hue and yet still stay in the boundaries of the way the eye sees. There is no figurative painter who works directly in front of the model that has reached his brilliant use of colour. Of course the more deeply one looks the more you see and a highly trained artist like Lenkiewicz probably saw 4 or 5 times more colour changes than the average artist. Cezanne’s quote about Monet would rightly apply to Lenkiewicz “ Monet is only an eye, but what an eye”

Compared to Lenkiewicz’s 300 to 400 hundred paintings a year Freud paints only 5 or 6 a year. Each of Freud’s images is an attempt at a masterpiece, although many images fall far from this standard. Lenkievicz claimed his pictures should not be seen singularly but only as a complete body of work under one of his themed projects. Both Artists have produced many bad paintings; Lenkiewicz has done many more, due to his output and need to make money, but in my mind has also produced more masterpieces as well.

We have been lucky to have two great painters, who have both contributed to the language of art. Their artistic legacy confirms that observational painting is still alive and full of new possibilities. Both of them will be seen as major role models for future generations of artists.

{Ed. our thanks to Nahem Shoa for allowing us to publish his article. Copyright and all rights remain the property of Nahem Shoa.}