The title of the forty-year-old portrait, Girl with a Kitten, sounds cute and cuddly, except the girl is really a woman, and her right hand is gripping the tabby’s neck. Choking is about the only way to keep a kitten still. Freud’s portraits from the late 1940s that open the big retrospective at the Hirshhorn (organized by Andrea Rose and the British Council) are haunting and almost entirely illustrative. The girl appears again and again, startled eyes big as tea saucers, a quicksilver beauty that would jump high at the sound of an automobile backfiring. This show is a jangle of nerves, and you tiptoe through it as a wary visitor in a mental ward.
In Girl with Roses, there is a striking tension between rigidity and sensuality. You can feel the broken webbing of the chair back, the sharp grid pattern cutting into the horizontal stripes of the girl’s sweater. You can smell the flower’s perfume, yet it, like the kitten, is held captive in her hand. (Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., to Nov. 29.)
In chronological order, the paintings grow more bizarre, a kind of time-lapse picture of Dorian Gray. Girl with a White Dog (1951–52) begins the transition to Freud’s famous “naked” portraits. It is a curious pose: her yellow robe partially open, revealing a pale breast in graphic detail. The now dreaded bull terrier rests its head dejectedly on her knee. The vertical blue lines of the mattress ticking run up the canvas, escaping the flesh folds of the yellow robe. The braided sash runs down her leg, stout enough for a hangman’s noose.
Interior in Paddington (1951) continues the morbid march past Freud’s characters that inhabit a world simultaneously aristocratic and down-and-out. One good thing about the pictures is that they make you realize how puny some American-styled realism is. His Proustian thirst for detail has no competition. You can only wonder why the heavy potted plant in the foreground straddles the planked wood floor, pinching the edges of the red rug. The bespectacled man in the gabardine raincoat stands still, as if shot with a tranquilizer dart. The plant and man are adversarial. A pointed leaf jabs at the dimpled chin. His fist is clenched but in no shape to strike.
Freud’s abrupt shift to a coarser bristle brush in the late 1950s shuts out any traces of drawing-room elegance, and peddled flesh takes over. Foreheads shine with clammy sweat, the bones bulge as if recovering from a bad beating. His “girls” turn ugly, as if they had run away to London’s Soho from cushy environs and got knocked around. Instead of Ingres, we get Ivan Albright. Pictures are brutally cropped and confront the viewer under naked light. The pace is unrelenting, like Freud’s gaze in a 1963 self-portrait, that of a hungry hawk in search of prey.
Freud looks down at us reflected in a large wall mirror or caught in an oval hand mirror balanced on a windowpane. The insatiable hunger of those beady eyes! No wonder his sitters look exhausted, on the verge of catalepsy. They come, again and again, to lie and lean on the same grungy couch, one rubbed by years of bare asses. The frayed fabric reveals the couch’s viscera, and it comes tumbling out. Freud—like Egon Schiele—is uncomfortably close, forcing his presence on us.
One of the strangest pictures—no doubt the one image that will send some Washington visitors scurrying for the exit—is Naked Man with Rat (1977–78). Its long tail curves over the young man’s muscular thigh, a chilling metaphor for mortality.
Freud’s nocturnal world closes in on you. Baron Thyssen (camouflaged by the pedestrian title Man in a Chair), elegantly suited, mimes the pose of Ingres’ Louis Bertin at the Louvre. Long fingers splayed across his thighs, the Baron avoids our gaze. A young woman, knees up on a black coverlet, presses one hand against her breast, as the glare of painted light ravages her flesh. Her head sinks into the dingy white pillow, which, against the black spread, resembles a nun’s habit. Pressed up against the cot, a paint-splattered table bears an earthenware dish of two sunny-side-up eggs, the yellow yolks yanking our attention. Are these the eyes of St. Lucy, or is the artist playing a macabre joke?
No one paints flesh like Freud. There is a sea of it to drown in. Apparently, a number of his explicitly painted nudes are his own children. Freud paints his mother in a series of catatonic poses—the one in an armchair, with a nude behind her on a cot and a paint-splashed mortar and pestle beneath her—is astounding. There are a few awful failures among the 80-plus paintings (unfortunately, even the oils are under glass), and Large Interior W11 (after Watteau) takes that prize despite Robert Hughes’ rapturous conclusions.
Freud did not appear at his Washington opening, the only venue on these shores before touring to Paris, London, and his birthplace, Berlin. His absence, like Gorbachev’s long “vacation,” adds another hyped veil of mystery to this grandson of Sigmund Freud. Looking at his last head-and-shoulders self-portrait (Reflection, 1985), you can feel the power of his paint—and it turns out to be a terrifying stand-in.