"Lucian Freud" by John Updike:
Yes, the body is a hideous thing,
the feet and genitals especially,
the human face not far behind. Blue veins
make snakes on the backs of hands, and mar
the marbled glassy massiveness of thighs.
Such clotted weight’s worth seeing after centuries
(Pygmalion to Canova) of the nude
as spirit’s outer form, a white flame: Psyche.
The full poem is here. Jerry Saltz remembers Lucian Freud, who passed away this week:
It is difficult to imagine anyone in the profoundly homogenous, deeply tribal English art world of the mid-twentieth century, becoming as well-known and respected an artist as the German-born grandson of the founder of psychoanalysis, someone with the last name Freud. It’s like being a Plato, as unthinkable as a Rockefeller's becoming a famous bohemian Abstract Expressionist in fifties America. As if the burden of a royal bloodline were not enough, few world-renowned artists strike me as having less inborn talent than Freud. … Yet Freud is an important touchstone for the many of us who secretly fear that we are not naturally gifted; we who are not precocious geniuses, we non-Picassos who are always unsure that we even are what we say we are.
(Image: a portrait of Sue Tilley, a civil servant in the UK, which sold for $33.6 million in 2008.)
The Dish 