Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) by Lucien Freud
Filthy Art.
All art is filthy.
And naked art is the filthiest. By definition. No matter your intentions like Michelangelo who created beauty in the classic form of a male statue. Beauty and filth. And here with the great master of the modern nude Lucien Freud, we have no need to honour the ancients or satisfy the classically educated leaders of the city-state or Empire of God. Here we have the human being in all its — and her disarming and desolate — glory.
Benefits Supervisor Sleeping is the very antithesis of the classical idea of beauty yet it is for me just as beautiful as any of those majestic masterpieces in stone and marble. And it is of course a resounding human response to the voyeurism of the male gaze in much of the preceding artworks within the official canon. It is filthy and quite beautiful.
Known for his evocative and unflinching portrait paintings, Lucian Freud has come to be recognized as one of the most important figurative painters of the 20th century. Freud — grandson of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud — was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1922, but his family relocated to London, England, in 1933 to escape the rise of Adolph Hitler.
Freud painted his friends, his lovers, and his children (he fathered many by several women but never lived…
