Artists' personalities: Freud, Lorca, Falla

Artists’ personalities: Thoughts on Freud, Lorca and Falla

One of the most notorious images of the 2016 US Presidential Election campaign is that of Donald Trump looming with menace over the back of Hillary Clinton in a televised debate. It projects a nasty archetype: woman as potential prey to a brutal man.

This image has been in my mind when visiting the exhibition: Lucian Freud: Self Portraits at the Royal Academy. True, Freud painted nothing so gross, or grotesque, as Trump’s presence, but he was certainly given to a bit of looming over his subjects.

The most obvious example is the portrait deemed “cruel” by some contemporaries (as noted in the curator’s caption). Caroline, his second wife, lies miserably – fearfully?- on a hotel bed, while a shadowed Freud lurks in the background. Is he skulking, sulking, or threatening? Or just projecting passive-aggressive boredom?

At all events, it is a portrait of rejection, and an unpleasant message to give the world. But that was not the sort of thing Freud cared about. He was pretty ruthless, whilst being magnetically attractive. Loyal only, perhaps, to paint, as here.

The early self portraits have a faintly thuggish air; but also start a life -long trend for self images that one might call “peek-a-boo”, were that not too saccharine. 

There’s Freud literally peeking around corners; later we see mirror self-portraits, including the distorted, nearly monstrous, image dominating two small children. Later there’s just scraps of self – shadows, a ghostly reflection…

All are suggestive of the artist’s external presence, one possessing the sitters or liers: it’s the studio of Freud, where he is in charge of time (sittings were notoriously long and repeated), and perhaps in charge of the model himself or herself.

The cumulative effect is unsettling, if one finds the character of the artist somewhat sociopathic. One can of course admit that the art is great work whilst feeling repelled by the artist – a dichotomy as old as art itself. But in the Self Portraits the one leaks slyly into the other.

An artist whose work is much more transparently connected to his life is Federico Garcia Lorca. An exhibition in Granada, just ended, El Jardin Deshecho (the Desolate Garden) charts the story of Lorca’s sexuality and search for love through letters, paintings and, of course, poetry and theatre.

(The exhibition was mounted by the Centro de Federico Garcia Lorca. The Centro is a large modern building inserted into a corner of C19 Granada and is devoted to Garcia Lorca scholarship. It contains large rather impersonal spaces. Its vast entrance atrium could be the departures hall of a very modern, very small airport.)

The Exhibition traces Lorca’s frustration at the bourgeois sterility of the Granada of his youth, his sympathy with the repressed existence of girls and young women, and his developing homosexuality, culminating in an affair with Salvador Dali. This seems to have been somewhat one sided in terms of true feelings (Lorca’s for Dali) and ended with a Dali put-down of Lorca’s work.

Lorca found himself both artistically and sexually in the early 1930s, when he travelled to the Americas. Argentina took to him enthusiastically as a writer and lecturer; the US too, where he seemed to be at home in the relatively permissive ambience of New York.

But in Spain culture wars were anticipating the real war. Lorca was marked by the Right as a homosexual and liberal, and Lorca knew it.

He was given a joyful commission by the Republican Government to tour the Barraca theatre company (see blog 18 April 2019). It was there that he met the young man who, the Exhibition suggests, might have become the love of his life, had Lorca lived.

The heart-breaking conclusion to the Exhibition was the display of the letter Lorca wrote to his friend from from Granada, just days before his murder. It is full of wisdom and tenderness. (The young man had had a showdown with his conservative father, about the proposal that he and Lorca should see out the war together in Argentina).

In Lorca we salute an admirable man, who has left work in which we welcome his generous and passionate personality.

Inspired by Lorca, and with a few hours to spare before our bus out of the unattractive Granada bus station, we walked up the Alhambra hill in search of the house that was rented the composer Manuel de Falla.

It is a small place, but un jardin muy bonito (no deshecho) and fine views over the west of Granada (now all built up with ugly developments, but mostly orchards in Falla’s time.

Falla is a composer of passion, with an interest, shared with Lorca, in Andalucian  musical traditions.

However, there appears to have been a great disconnect, in Falla’s case, between art and life. Our knowledgeable and enthusiastic guide told us, and demonstrated, many things: Falla’s hypochondria (his bedroom crowded with pills and potions);

his alcohol hand scrubs; his (a)sexuality (he perhaps thought it too messy); his devout Catholicism. Yet he was friends with Picasso (who made designs for Falla's opera, The Three-Cornered Hat), Debussy and other avant garde artists and musicians, including Lorca.

And, in spite of his Catholicism, no friend of Franco. (When Lorca was seized by the Nationalists in Granada, Falla went to plead for him- too late: Lorca had already been shot.)

Is Falla an example of an artist who steps into a different world when composing or playing? Unlike Freud, where the real world menaces the artistic. Unlike Lorca, where the real world becomes the artistic.

Jan 2020