Lucian Freud: Review of Drawing in Drawing – No, I don’t want to go up and see these engravings | fee

IDrawing is a fast car, and drawing is like riding a bus. At least that’s what it felt like to me, as I walked up Route 27 to Paddington, the National Portrait Gallery’s route past Lucian Freud’s drawings, etchings, and even childhood crayons, daydreaming to my stop, with the occasional flash of color and glow as one of the gallery’s “carefully selected group of important paintings” passed.

This is a sad review to write. Freud seemed an indisputable genius in his lifetime, and I still stand in awe of the great modern paintings for which he won that crown. One of his 1990s photographs of “benefits supervisor” Sue Tilley shines here, quite literally, as her face falls into her hand as she sleeps upright in an armchair, while Freud impatiently inspects every pore and blemish on her large, naked body and translates it into an ecstasy of olive grey, white, violet, punctured, opaque, sublime.

But these climactic moments are surrounded by so much malice that it makes you doubt it was anything special. I wish I could criticize the curators for failing to do him justice, but when an artist leaves this much mediocre body of work to his name, you have to face the facts. Freud produced a lot of nonsense as well as his fragments of greatness.

I’ve always tried to avoid looking at his engravings but they thrust into your face here as if they were highlights of his later years. They oscillate between the ordinary and the terrible. There is no elegance or boldness in the paintings: faces and bodies are defined by heavily shaded edges that look precious and weary. At best they are posters. Tilly’s two versions seem like advertisements for his art rather than manifestations of it.

I laughed — not in a good way — at Man Posing, a 1985 drawing of a naked male model on a couch with his penis and testicles in front between splayed legs. It’s not his genitals that disappoint, it’s his sad, stupid face, too big for his body. The result is strange without being witty or moving. However, there is a small painting next to it of the same man in the same position, which is dazzling and charming. The balls are a dark pink red, blazing from his white flesh like a cock’s comb.

Freud is the artist’s albatross, glorious when he flies across the canvas, clumsy when he stumbles in black and white on the floor. It is difficult to see why he took an interest in etching when he was reaching his peak as a painter – was it due to a few extra pops, the old-fashioned, elaborate connotations of this medium in which Rembrandt and Picasso excelled, or just the need for a graphic outlet? Because the NPG suggests that Freud began as a painter first—a careful, patient observer of thorns, dead monkeys, and the human face—and then a painter second.

However, his meticulous painting style tapers off unexpectedly as his early works are piled up one after another – as for his childhood pictures from Berlin, a child could have drawn them. This is where the show starts to seem indulgent, confusing and damp. Did you think Freud was harsh and cruel? His drawings of Kitty Jarman and other beauties, as well as himself and his male friends from the 1940s and 1950s, appear sentimental. He loves a pretty face, and in his 1946 chalk and crayon drawing titled “Girl,” desire softens his eyes.

Freud is a more beautiful man, but a lesser artist. Perhaps what went wrong here was that curators and art historians who did not remember Freud as a living artist, and did not feel he was contemporary, began to re-evaluate him as an “interesting” rather than urgent historical figure. They succeeded disappointingly in redefining him as a minor British artist, making delicate, elegant drawings that he translated in the 1950s into modest paintings. But this Freud died. There’s a crack midway through the show when he announces that, in the 1960s, he gave up his fascination with drawing to delve into pure paint. His brilliant and terrifying 1963 self-portrait, a painted grenade of staring eyes and bruised-looking flesh, announces the years without drawing.

The moment he put down his sketchbook, he became an artist who carried us. He chose to paint – drawing from life, with models in front of him as he added another touch of purple or black to her oil version. He was perhaps less intelligent than his mysterious personality suggested. He worked by instinct, not thought, and when he hit a vein he was great, but he made mistakes sometimes. NPG focuses on errors.

Why hold such a stupid, perverted exhibition? I have heard that it is difficult to borrow Freud’s great paintings because many of them are in private hands. But if collectors of Freud’s works are truly uncooperative, they are risking their own investments. A few more offers like this and his prices will fall through the roof.