Lucian Freud at the National Portrait Gallery

‘Girl with Beret’ (1951-52).

Long before he was using paint as a blistering variant of flesh, the pictures had another sort of realism. The early 1940s portraits show square-headed and boss-eyed people, the lines of their jaws or eyebrows very clear and almost bracingly definite. But expression comes into them, an Otto Dix-like fixity of gaze, the figures often glassy-eyed and slightly green-faced, caught in the act of being. There’s still a touch of the pencil about these works: the shading is delicate and the people are fractured, but they are not yet disassembled by their own media. You can actually see Freud’s style morphing into itself. The 1950s portraits, Sleeping Nude (1950), for example, and Girl in a Green Dress (1954), are still drawn, sharply defined, thin on paint. The great coagulation begins in 1958 with Woman Smiling. The background is foggy and troubled and so is the skin: there’s now a difference to the way the paint is being used.

In this style, the one that stayed, the pictures are objects in which the mind appears to be made of paint, just as the ears and the lips and the sternum and the belly are paint. With time the painterliness of Freud’s portraits will come to obliterate the subjects. Content will be a manipulation of form, a swish of the brush, and the people in Freud’s paintings will be what the brush wants them to be. For more than forty years – from 1968 – every painting is compelled by a vision of flesh and paint as being essentially the same substance, redolent of weight and mass gone wrong, of solidity petrified.