Lucan Freud's Portraits and Haiku
Lucan Freud's Portraits and Haiku
by David Grayson
“I think the most boring thing you can say about a work of art is that it’s ‘timeless’. That induces a kind of panic in me.” ~ Lucian Freud
In 1987, a retrospective of Lucian Freud’s paintings opened at the Hirshhorn Gallery in Washington, DC. In the exhibit’s catalogue essay, the art critic Robert Hughes judged Freud as “the greatest living realist painter.” A New York Times review of the show noted that once you’ve seen Freud’s paintings you “can never again look at another human being in quite the same way.”
In the years after World War II, when Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art were ascendant in the Western art world, the London-based Freud was steadily working in what seemed to be an old-fashioned genre: portraits. Over time, however, it became apparent that Freud was producing unprecedented work that had lessons for painters, sculptors, and other artists. Notably, for haiku poets, although Freud worked in a different medium, his approach shared important commonalities with haiku and sheds light on the form’s strengths.
A first principle in haiku is that meaning is mutually created by both the writer and reader. For example, Lee Gurga has described the reader as a “co-poet” rather than simply a consumer of the haiku. Freud too viewed a portrait as a collaboration; in his case, between artist and subject. Hughes relates: “Rather than speak of painting ‘from the nude’—implying distance and even a certain subtraction—Freud is careful to say ‘with,’ implying collaboration, a conspiracy towards the image mutually arrived at.” Freud explained that “the painting is always done very much with their co-operation.” He didn’t insist on a specific pose for the sitter; he didn’t want his subject “doing something not native to them” or playing a role.
