Do we need another Lucian Freud exhibition?

Do we need another Lucian Freud exhibition? After years of exposure to his paintings of naked bodies posed like casualties of a car crash in a nudist camp, we might have reached the ‘move along, nothing to see here’ point. But it seems we can’t get enough of the monstre sacré. To mark the centenary of his birth in 1922, London is being treated to a Freud fest of no fewer than seven exhibitions, the most prestigious of which is at the National Gallery.

Subtitled New Perspectives, the National’s show promises a change of viewpoint from the perspective now most commonly associated with Freud (that of looking down on figures sprawled or splayed across beds or sofas), a promise initially fulfilled in the opening room of rarely seen early works painted under the influence of Cedric Morris. From the sulky teenage ‘Self-portrait’ (1940) to the wide-eyed ‘Woman with a Tulip’ (1945), the young Freud approached his human subjects head-on with a level, sharply penetrating gaze.

But what might have been formative works became dead ends when, in the mid-1950s, he underwent a complete change of artistic personality. Two things happened: he took to standing at the easel dominating his subject and – under the influence of Francis Bacon – he exchanged the razor-sharp focus of his youthful paintings for loose, expressive brushstrokes emphasising the physicality of flesh.

Freud’s new looser handling didn’t soften the hawk-eyed gaze that caught his early female subjects like rabbits in the headlights. Determined to paint things ‘that are not made up’, he directed the same ruthless observation at everything – flesh, floorboards, furniture, houseplants, piles of paint rags – in his line of vision, including his children.