New work of an old master

Freud and his unnamed model thought up the pose together for The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer

5 April 2012

Towards the end of last summer, Lucian Freud began a self-portrait. It was to be biggish, he told me. Larger than the two that he had done in recent years. "Rather a spectacular picture." Involving ... well, no, he really didn't want to go into it yet. All he would say was that he'd had this idea.

A few weeks later, on the phone one morning, he suddenly said: "Hey, I've thought of a title: The Painter Is Surprised by a Naked Admirer. What do you think?" Sounds like one of those decorously randy Poussins (Acis and Galatea Surprised by Polyphemus), I thought.

Twelve years ago, when he was 70, Freud did himself naked as Painter Working, Reflection, a lean and calculating figure in unlaced boots brandishing a palette knife. This time the idea was to stage an interruption. Painter working, as before, but grabbed by the leg.

A young woman, muse or nuisance (maybe both), was to clamp herself to him. Somebody wronged, one could imagine, trying a citizen's arrest. Or, more likely, a playful supplicant assuming a Poussin pose.

Before I saw the painting in progress for the first time, Freud mentioned a relevant Courbet, The Studio of the Painter, 1854, that supremely ostentatious tableau, 11ft by 20ft, in which representatives of the downtrodden and exploited, also Baudelaire, Napoleon III and a naked model, play court to the painter as he touches up a distant crag in a towering landscape.

Unlike Courbet, whose extended title for his painting was The Studio of the Painter: A Real Allegory Summing up Seven Years of My Artistic Life, Freud doesn't do allegory. Painter Surprised was to be himself working as usual in his topfloor studio. No elaboration, no extras. The Pygmalion of Holland Park, it could be, moved by the presence of his live Galatea, looking down at her affectionately.

In reality, of course, because any self-portrait done from life has to be worked from a reflection, eyes down proves pretty well impossible, particularly at a distance. Eyes up: Freud had to check constantly in the mirror across the room, then, with loaded brush or knife, face the easel. It would be better, he decided, to give himself a brush to hold rather than a palette knife; less flash, in effect, and, indeed, less likely to excite talk of fantasy sacrifice.

Night after night, over six months, Painter Surprised absorbed him: "To make it seem more immediate you've got to do a lot of work." Nothing was to be less than immediate; nothing could be treated as subsidiary, not the dumped paint rags, not even the bare floor. Nor the paint-encrusted studio walls.

Painting the paint, indeed depicting the scrapings from useless brushstrokes (paint that had become, in effect, daubed mud, accrued over 25 years), was a feature of the act of rendering fact poetic.

Complications set in. This being a painting of a mirror image of a painting being painted, he had to decide how far to develop the picture-within-picture aspect. By mid-November, he had worked to a halfway stage the subsidiary reversed image of the painting on the easel. Within that, doubly foreshortened, he inserted a smaller image of the painting, a smudgy sort of echo.

By the New Year there was more precise disposition. Floorboards were laid in and a shadow began scything across the middle ground to draw together painter and model and the chair standing by, loaded with brushes. The chair was now the third party in the affair. The easel with its fine handle - highlights applied before dawn one January morning - became an active player too, the image of the canvas adding a squeezed angle.

As for Freud himself, being both painter and painted, he had to be hyperactive when it came to depicting the look and feel of being in the clutches of his admirer. He had to stare, memorise, disengage his left leg and take two steps across the floor to within reach of the easel and rely on detail recall to get the immediacy right.

The admirer is no phantom. Artist and model thought up the pose between them. Freud reworked her body ("made it more there"), cut back on the hair, took her head out and reset it ("more architecture to it") achieving lively and complicit character.

In relation to her, Freud casts himself not so much as the Pygmalion of Holland Park, more as a Prospero working his magic in defiance of awareness that he is well into the conceivably redemptive Act III of a long and noted working life. ("'Dirty bastard' becomes 'Hey, he can still do it'," he told me.)

In early February he turned his attention to the floor, particularly where the small chaos of discarded paint rags needed reshaping. "Made the rags more specific, somehow." By 19 February he was down to minutiae: the degree of emphasis in his eyebrows. Two days later: "I made the head too dramatic; because I was feeling dramatic, due to my fragile health."

Working further on the admirer's head, he found himself thinking about a late Watteau - "His most moving picture. At the doctor's; someone getting on a horse." The key components now stood clear: the painting on the easel, the attendant chair, the brushes in the mug tilting on a shrouded radiator, and the tideline of smirched rags. The two figures were solidly present, the admirer rather more so than the painter who, in the end, holds neither palette knife nor brush. " Something slightly rhymed has gone."

How to get elation into a painting? "You can't put it in; it can get in. It's always a stimulating thought that this might be the last picture."

Painter Surprised is itself surprising. Contained yet allusive, it represents the urge to paint, the act of painting, the onset of poignancy, without in any way claiming allegorical status or significance.

"It's got a funny feeling; it looks as if it were done long ago," Freud remarked the other day when the painting was ready for the framers. "Not the idiom: it's to do with the distance and things. It's like doing it on another planet."

The Painter Is Surprised by a Naked Admirer goes on show at the National Portrait Gallery (020 7312 2463) tomorrow until 8 May (admission free); then at Museo Correr in Venice as part of a major Freud exhibition, coinciding with the Venice Biennale (12 June to 30 October).

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