FREUD (To be read aloud)
When we look at the etymology of the term Pilgrim we first find ‘peregrine’ – this having its roots in Latin (Peregrinus meaning foreigner) but there are other archaic meanings: coming from abroad, travelling or wandering. This also explains the Peregrine Falcon who undertakes one of the longest journeys of any migratory bird. Late Latin into old Spanish, passed into old French and the word is finally lent to old English – pelenn into pilegrim. We finally see contemporary English develop a pair of similarly related words:
Peregrine: Having a tendency to wander
Pilgrim: Someone who travels to a holy place
Beyond the origin of this word, what it means to be a pilgrim, what it means to undertake this kind of journey, but as an artist, sparks something. We understand pilgrims of course, as those who undertake a spiritual journey through a physical realm, generally on foot, towards a search for moral significance, for catharsis or even as penance. John Wayne uses the word to great effect in his filmography referring to new arrivals in his town as interlopers – ‘Howdy Pilgrim!’ These Easterners who have recently arrived in the ‘Wild West’ in a state described as ‘soft, timid and moralising – values associated with religion, rather than the bitter realities of violent frontier life.’
I become interested in the idea of Lucian Freud as a Pilgrim or Peregrin upon reading Mic Moroney’s Irish Arts Review piece on ‘Lucian Frued: Prophet of Discomfort.’ He writes:
‘Freud has already shown in London and Paris when he came to Dublin in 1948 partly on pilgrimage to Jack B. Yeats, who had just enjoyed a retrospective at the Tate; and whom Frued declared the greatest living painter.’
This phrase, this expression, I can’t get it out of my head. The essay goes on to document Frued’s well known shenanigans and gives a thorough account of his visits to Ireland, his connections to this place, to the Irish communities both native and abroad. He paints us, he has romantic relationships with us. So what is it that is different, what is it that changes when an artist undertakes a journey? Are they always a pilgrim, differing to that of ‘tourist’ or ‘journeyman’ or ‘explorer?’ It could be said that this term is the one that is crucial to understanding the interconnectedness of Frued and Jack B. Yeats – the places they visit, the mutual friends, the similarity of their application, the changes of those styles even, as they age and their work develops. The formal qualities, the tacit handling of their painted matter; could it be found in the stacked peaty boglands of Connemara? Wild western Atlantic seas? Wild western Atlantic redheads?
I think of ‘Three Men on an Island’ - a beautifully illustrated account of a season in 1951 whereby a young James Macintyre recounts painting with George Campbell and Gerard Dillon on Inishlacken, a tiny island off the coast of Connemara. He says:
‘Painting after painting shot past me like shooting stars, seen for a fraction of a second to be replaced by another and then another. I had never in my life encountered a landscape like this. The Mournes had a slumbering grandeur, but this wilderness, the desolation, the raw colour and stark composition in front of me had me punch drunk.’
Perhaps it is the ‘Episodical-ist’ Freud described by Jim Barnes that is drawn to Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ and the city itself. Burnt sienna gushes of his own Liffey Swim, epiphanic fragments seen in Joyce’s writing who, as Richard Ellmann says: ‘would be the abrupt revelation of the whatness of a thing…when the soul of the commonest object…seems to us radiant.’
I go back to this expression often – ‘the whatness of a thing.’ Some will be familiar with this in other terms, with another’s explanation. Heidegger’s ‘Dasein’ – ‘Being There’ or ‘There Being’ – whether this be consciousness or a consciousness of the self it comes down to a particular type of tacit knowledge. Painters, GOOD painters, understand this inherently. It resides in the thing with which they are most familiar; that is to say substances, the materiality of canvas weave, warp and weft. Gluttonous oil, linseed, rabbit skin glue and surfaces yielding. Philosophy forgets that painters appoint their own spaces upon which to work. They delegate and control that yield before any mark is made. There is a brief but telling signal of this in Martin Gayford’s narration of sitting for his Freud portrait ‘Man with a Blue Scarf:’
‘There is more delay while we try to set up the easel, LF initially trying to knock the nut the wrong way – tighter – with a hammer. After starting work (!), L.F. pauses to tighten the canvas, which he thinks is sagging because of the dampness of the evening, by tapping in chocks in the corners, again with a hammer. “I like it to be very firm because if my brush pushes the canvas in, I feel it spoils my sense that I am painting something real. I think, Oh no! I’m only painting a picture. I once saw Bill Coldstream at work and was surprised to see there were great sags at the sides of the canvas he was working on.’
So much has been written about Luggala, Co. Wicklow - the place has taken on somewhat of a mythical status. Frequented by the likes of Dolores Keane, Mick Jagger, Sting, Brendan Behan, John, Paul, George and Ringo; from rising stars to the established glitterati of various scenes. Of course, Freud visits; who wouldn’t want to go on a pilgrimage to Fancy Mountain?! Garech deBrun (who was the Estates last great custodian, musical pioneer – an original ‘playboy!’) recalls the friendly generosity of this person who teaches him how to ‘use his eyes’ properly at the Lourve and ‘sneaking him into ill-reputed Soho establishments.’ (Atrcle) In Moroney’s 2007 Pilgrim article he describes one of Freud’s pieces, then on show in IMMA. ‘” Head of a Boy 1957” (the subject is Irish but does not wish to be identified), a beautiful, tiny painting of a shy boy; an adolescent rash beneath full lips – a little masterpiece of sweet youth.’ We now know of course that this painting depicts deBrun. The Beatles’ song ‘A Day in the Life’ is attributed to his brother Tara who died in a car accident at the age of 21, ‘I read the news today, oh boy.’
There is another testimony to this place found deep in a collection of works by John Montague. He, along with Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and Antony Cronin amongst others form the literary verse of writers Freud finds himself amongst in Ireland. It is simply entitled ‘Luggala; For Garech Browne:
‘Again and again in dream I return to that shore. There is a wind rising, a gull is trying to skim over the pines, and the waves whisper and strike along the bright sickle of the little strand. Shoving through reeds and rushes, leaping over a bog brown stream, I approach the temple by the water’s edge, deaths shrine, cornerstone of your sadness. I stand inside, by one of the pillars of the mausoleum, and watch the water in the stone basin. As the wind ruffles cease, a calm surface appears, like a mirror or crystal. And into it your face rises, sad beyond speech, sad with an acceptance of blind, implacable process. For by this temple are three tombs, a baby brother, a half-sister and a grown brother, killed at twenty-one. Their monuments of Wicklow granite are as natural here as the scattered rocks, but there is no promise of resurrection, only the ultimate silence of the place, the shale littered face of the scree, the dark, dark waters of the glacial lake.’
Pilgrims today wishing to undertake one of the most famous routes, the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain (the way of St. James) can still today begin this journey by having their commute passport stamped at St. James’ gate in Dublin. This little morsel is usually thrown out to visitors on tours of the city but I believe it testifies to the historicity of pilgrimage in Ireland. We take this stuff seriously. We don’t just climb Croagh Patrick, we climb it barefoot with the blood running out of us! We sail towards Skellig Michael off the west coast of Kerry towards a pointed, rocky shard to a monastic outpost, climbing 500 handhewn steps up a 1000 year old stairway. Perhaps this is to make a bit of use of the place after the Vikings finally left the monks alone in the 13th Century. We do pilgrimage WELL here. That same doggedness that turned us outward into the world also turns us in on ourselves. Freud liked this poem by Patrick Kavanagh:
Epic
I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting “Damn your soul!”
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
“Here is the march along these iron stones.”
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.
Lucian Freud in Ireland is confronted with coast all around him. Even he cannot resist the urge to leave the interior for a moment, to capture a Connemara boat sitting for all the world like a beached whale. He is surrounded by a people looking outward and inward at the same time. Reaching for the visible and invisible. It could be said that this is what Frued was striving for, in his pilgrimage to Yeats. We recall his dislike of the canvas sag, oh no, I’m only painting a picture. And I think of Maurice Merleau Ponty who writes ‘we… recognise that a naked colour, and in general a visible, is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being, offered all naked to a vision which could be only total or null, but is rather a sort of straights between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open, something that comes to touch lightly and makes diverse regions of the coloured or visible world resound at the distances, a certain differentiation, an ephemeral modulation of this world – less a colour or a thing, therefore, than a difference between things and colours, a momentary crystallization of coloured being or of visibility. Between the alleged colours and visibles, we would find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things.’
There is in Freud a form of devotion to the flesh of this world. Both he and Yeats sought to understand this life; the stain of this inner life versus it’s outer reality, in the way that a cloth cap sits, just so, on a man from Aran’s head, or the unceasing wag of a whippet’s tail.