Freud: The Art

The largest retrospective of Lucian Freud's work ever to be mounted will give us an unprecedented opportunity to evaluate the range and overall achievement of an artist who is now widely regarded as the greatest living realist painter of the human figure. More than 160 paintings, etchings and drawings in all will be on view, from a very accomplished apprentice work of the late 1930s called Box of Apples in Wales, to four portraits completed in the painter's studio earlier this year.

The trajectory of Freud's long career is an instance of an almost wilfully defiant individualism. Throughout the greater part of a century that saw the emergence of one soon-to-be-jaded artistic "ism" after another, Freud has guarded his professional privacy, maintaining a fiercely aloof apartness from it all, as if nothing really mattered but the question of his own self-betterment as a painter. His masters have, for the most part, been dead ones: Courbet, Ingres, Rodin, Velazquez, Degas, Manet, Cézanne. He has gone to each of them in turn, seeking sips of sustenance on the way, as he pursued a fiercely individualistic destiny. Above all, he seems never to have heard anyone say that painting as a means of communicating a singular vision of the world might, after all, be dead or, at best, hopelessly démodé. He has always known that it could still be singularly alive, in a way that mere photography could never be.

The show begins with the aforementioned still life of a box of apples firmly set against a view of Welsh hills. The apples were painted in Dedham; the 16-year-old Freud added the mountains after a holiday at Capel Curig – and some of the finest works of his apprenticeship belong to this genre. Among the best of these is Dead Heron, painted in 1945. With its wings splayed so that it crowds out almost the entire picture space, feathers carefully layered, and painstakingly painted, so that the bird's plumage looks as solid and indomitable as armoured mail, the dead thing has a frighteningly commanding presence, not in any way diminished by the fact that it is no longer alive. Indeed, its very rigidity gives us a frisson – as if it might just be feigning after all.

Ten years later, at the age of 26, Freud is already addressing the problems of human portraiture with a new and arresting authority. In Girl with Roses (1947-8), he takes as his subject his wife Kitty. We are startled by her bulbous, averted eyes, and by the meticulous attention he gives to every strand of her hair. She clasps the rose tenaciously, almost fearfully, as if there is something dangerously at risk here. There is nothing easy or comfortable about this portrait. Its emotional discomfiture almost seems to grate on the eye.

Soon after Kitty, and that desperate clutching for dear life at her flowers, comes an almost shockingly tender, Ingres-esque black and white Conté drawing of the French painter and designer Christian Bérard, head reclining on a pillow, close to the comforts of death. This is a magnificent, almost uniquely tender work, and it is particularly affecting for the way in which the rhythm of the beard hairs, so lovingly and meticulously painted, seem to work against the rhythm of the hairy material of the dressing gown. This is a masterpiece of sheer, hard-headed craftsmanship.

Four years on, in 1952, come two more great male portraits, one of which, alas, will not be seen in this show because it was stolen 15 years ago – the painter himself offered a reward for its return. To no avail. Freud's small painting of Francis Bacon, painted on copper, is a wonderful seizing of another's personality. Bacon's love of sheer style, his fondness for posing, are both evident in this painting – the lusciously long eyelashes, the dropping curl, that very slight upward turn of the lip – it is a masterpiece of human characterisation. And it is utterly different in spirit from Freud's portrait in oils of the painter John Minton. Minton's face – with those long, hanging teeth and dreamily aqueous eyes – is the epitome of melancholy.

Months before painting Minton, Freud had completed a prizewinning painting for the Festival of Britain, Interior in Paddington (1951). Harry Diamond, who was a bit of a rough one, poses menacingly in his mac, fag hanging from his left hand. The object with which he is sparring is a fiercely spiky and utterly dominating plant – one of many such plants in Freud's work. There is a scene of post-war Paddington through the window, drab, cheerlessly urban, and home to Freud for many years.

In the last years of his mother's life (following the death of his father in 1970), Freud was in the habit of driving her to his studio and painting her, where she would sit or lie passively for hours at a time. It was a way of both caring for her and scrutinising the powerful presence of a speechless muse. Some of these portraits, among which is The Painter's Mother Reading (1975), are among the best of his works.

It was from the middle 1960s onwards that Freud began to show an ever- increasing absorption in the painterly potential of the nude, culminating in the series of paintings of the late Leigh Bowery (the performance artist) and Sue Tilley (a civil servant) in the 1990s. Responses to these paintings have often been alarming, if not condemnatory. Why? Because Freud's paintings have had the capacity to make you wince. And so it has been with his portrayal of the flesh, the sheer, unavoidable fleshiness of the flesh, whether it be the extravagant folds and mounds of Bowery or the extraordinarily meaty bulk Tilley.

He has also painted a number of fine naked portraits of his daughters Rose Boyt and Esther Freud, dismissing the murmurs of disapproval with characteristic insouciance. "They make it all right for me to paint them," he once told an interviewer. "My naked daughters have nothing to be ashamed of." What exactly is it about the flesh, though, that causes Freud to take such painstaking efforts to render it so palpably? In the case of Bowery, it must have had something to do with the extraordinary variousness of his vast body – its monstrous lumpishness, for example; or how its colour would change from a bruised blue on a flank through to the most delicate of pinks elsewhere.

Freud's paintings, from first to last, have certainly been severe, if not unflinching. There is nothing accommodating about his vision of the world. There is little gaiety, and certainly no space for sentimentality. His subjects, in his portraiture, are painted with an extraordinary degree of absorption and concentration, but also entirely without pity, and that could be regarded as ruthless, if not almost baleful. There is no deliberate staging about the portraiture, though. He does not oblige his models to adopt particular poses because he is after particular effects, tragic, melancholic or otherwise. It is matter of letting what is inside his models emerge, bit by bit, and that requires time, hard work – his hours in the studio have always been long – and an infinity of patience. As with Leon Kossoff, Freud's models tend to be long-standing acquaintances, relatives or friends. And as for posture, people tend to lie as they fall. Or crouch. Or slump.

It has been a matter, throughout his life, of nurturing and keeping faith with his own emerging talents, of following them where they must lead him. He has painted human beings without blinking. He has painted the flesh as he has seen it, in all its indomitable fleshliness, in all its craggy beauty and in all its awkward, messy unloveliness.

Lucian Freud is at Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1 (020-7887 8008) from 20 June to 22 September