Studies in monumental flesh

The brief entry on Lucian Freud in the 20th-century volume of The Dictionary of British Art ends with the words: "Unquestionably the greatest realist of his day". Herbert Read described him as "the Ingres of existentialism", one of those resonant critical aphorisms which actually grows on one and becomes more perceptive the more Freud paints. This massive book contains some 316 pages of large and excellent colour plates, of which approximately a quarter come from the catalogue of the great 1993 Whitechapel Gallery exhibition of Freud's recent work. As a comprehensive record of the artist's oeuvre to date (Freud is 74), it does the job for the time being and is a very fair representation of the man who, since the death of Francis Bacon - whom he portrayed with much virtuosity in 1953 - is almost certainly England's greatest living painter.

For at least half a century realism has been out - almost a dirty word, certainly a pejorative one, among art students, their teachers and many commercially successful artists. Only a man with a keen sense of the past and an extraordinary confidence and sense of self could have pursued a career as Freud did and have triumphed so convincingly.

While it is too easy, with hindsight, to discover talent in the juvenilia of a genius, it is none the less fascinating to see how, as a teenager, Freud was painting with great skill and maturity. His portrait of his teacher Cedric Morris, done while he was at art school at Dedham, aged 18, is fully armed.

Unusually, very little of his early work is derivative. There is a touch of de Chirico in the sinister "Memory of London" of 1939-40, a hint in a sketchbook, of George Grosz, who was one of the few modern artists he admired, but, by the mid-1940s, what we see is pure Freud and nothing else. Even the exuberant surrealism of "The Painter's Room", with its red-striped zebra's head, is not by Magritte or Dali but all his own work.

Few artists have, in our time, depicted animals, whether dead or alive, with such empathy and no other 20th-century painter has had such skill with portraits, both clothed and nude. "Girl With a White Dog" of 1951-52 is almost an archetypal Freudian image, as the woman is almost fully clothed but has one breast exposed and the dog is like a full partner in the psychological transaction enacted between painter and sitter. While indeed Ingres-like in its realism nothing could be further from the academy, where portraiture has been perhaps more of a commercial than a psychological transaction. No commissioner of a portrait could possibly cope with the depth of perception into character or the ruthless honesty of the flesh painting.

Later, as in "Naked Girl" of 1966 or "Naked Girl Asleep II" of 1968, we see Freud painting with an erotic obsession not unlike that of Egon Schiele. These intensely erotic works are as far removed from the Playmate of the Month and other soft porn as could be. The genitals are meticulously painted: we see the blemishes of the flesh that human beings not employed by Mr Hefner all possess. Instead of the glare of the photographer's lamps we have the realistic light of the studio and the bony protuberances of hips and ribs, the texture of skin rendered not by air brush but by paint brush. Inevitably, therefore, we have an erotic charge beyond anything the pornographers can offer.

Bruce Bernard is interesting on why the intensely heterosexual Freud paints only gay men for his male nudes; and his huge late paintings of the performance artist Leigh Bowery were a dominant feature of the Whitechapel show and this book, requiring a separate review of their own.

Some critics find Freud distasteful and some people find his treatment of the human figure too ruthless and too clinical, thus rendering people, and hence the paintings, ugly. What this book makes clear, because for once the colour reproductions are on a sufficiently large scale, is why and how people could hold such views and why in fact they are wrong.

The monumentality of the Bowery paintings and those of the massive Sue Tilley, the benefits supervisor known affectionately as "Big Sue", create and communicate their own beauty and are the reverse of clinical no matter how realistically every fold of bulging flesh is rendered. Freud clearly himself loves these outre figures as human beings and not simply as eccentric models.

One need only look at the way in which he paints his daughters, whether as small children or as adults, to see the tenderness of the feeling as well as the accomplishment of the painting.

Perhaps it is the staggering virtuosity which puts people off in an age where so much artistic respect is given to the slick and the slapdash. Yet few of those who admired Whistler's skill felt that the portrayal of his mother was clinical or ruthless. The emotional naysayers should look carefully at Freud's series of paintings of his recently widowed mother. Probably not since Rembrandt has anybody represented feminine old age with such realism and with such perfect and compassionate tenderness. There is no one in England to touch him.

After spending many hours with this truly splendid volume one cannot help feeling that it was exactly what the artist wanted - and there's the rub. Freud is, with his OM and CH and his colossal prices, a figure not likely to be gainsaid. While Bernard's essay is elegant and we also have Lawrence Gowing's useful 1982 book and good catalogue introductions from John Russell, Catherine Lampert and others, this book is frustratingly short of hard information. The notes on the plates simply give the usual data of title, medium, date, dimensions, etc. But if both "Man in a Chair" of 1989 and "Head of a Man" of 1991 look suspiciously like Lord Rothschild, one surely wants to know what passed between painter and banker, just as we would like to know more of Freud's marriage to the brilliant Caroline Blackwood. Clearly all this will have to wait until after the artist's death when perhaps we shall get the serious biographical and critical study this great painter needs and deserves.

T. G. Rosenthal is a publisher, critic and author of the book The Art of Jack B Yeats.