Lucian Freud: Etchings 1946-2004
Until June 13; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

There’s something about the truth that’s hard to define. To make a true representation of a person, is it the surface of their body that counts? Is it their eyes - that window on the soul – or should we ignore the outward quirks of fate and use visual metaphors to conjure up the invisible essence of the subject?

Of course there are no easy answers, and since the art world’s appetite for figurative painting waned ten years ago, few people care. One notable exception is Lucian Freud, Sigmund’s grandson, who started making art in the 1940s and whose unique and timeless vision of humanity is still as intense today – and as unequivocally true – as it was all those decades ago.

While the Wallace Collection in London shows Freud’s recent paintings, The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art wins the honour of staging the first ever museum retrospective of the artist’s etchings. Almost every print Freud ever made is in this show, along with a smattering of paintings for comparative purposes.

Freud’s undisputed draughtsmanship lends itself to printmaking, and it is strange that although he made a handful of etchings at the outset of his career, he abandoned the medium for 40 years until the 1980s. As a result, the gradual unfurling of the artist’s mature voice – a process usually revealed in the spotlight of a retrospective – is missing here. From the illustrative naivety of the first room we are catapulted into the fully fledged viscerality of an artist at the height of his prowess.

Freud is best known for his incisive paintings of family and friends, where controlled throngs of chalky colours bind together to portray the muscles and bones over which skin is little more than a translucent wrap. That Freud wears a butcher’s apron in his studio is apt. His subjects – the people and animals he loves – are meat, grissle, bones and pubic hair without an ounce of sentimentality.

Because his sitters are not self-conscious in the face of Freud’s unflinching analysis, the result is dignified. It is true. These people are not shown as products of their environment or as players in the game of life. They often lie naked, preoccupied or asleep, in a pictorial vacuum. They are not at a table with their books, wearing their Sunday best, or engaging the viewer with a quizzical stare; they are not trying to be someone – they are simply being.

Freud’s etchings are by no means poor cousins to his paintings, and in fact the small oil study of his mother from 1972 is full of tiny hatches and stipples like an etching simply bursting to get out. His masterly use of the line, here in smooth sworls, and there in bold scars, creates a vast range of tonal subtlety, while some of his bold compositions rely almost entirely on black contours against white flesh.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of this exhibition is that Freud doesn’t even need colour to realise his fleshy vision of human existence. These etchings really are, as the old joke goes, black and white and red all over.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 18.04.04