The many paintings of Freud's mother were a particular source of interest and conversation. ("At least he didn't ask her to take her clothes off," someone joked.) Two retirees were going from painting to painting, just looking at the hands, which they then compared to their own as if competing to see who had more age spots. One of them, a stout, ebullient woman, suddenly turned to me. "Do you think Freud is sex-obsessed?" she asked. "I don't think he's sex-obsessed, but my friend does. Maybe it's because he's a Freud and he felt he had to live up to his name." Then she raised her arms like someone who's just scored a touchdown and said: "I am a Freud!"
"Well, he claims never to have read Sigmund Freud," I said.
"Bullshit!" she snapped. "I don't believe that for a minute. He read him!"
Not all the commentary was so gossipy. "The light source is suggested by the varnish on the floor," a professorial type murmured to his companions as they gathered in front of a large nude. Elsewhere, two young men in short sleeves and a woman with long black hair moved slowly from painting to painting, remarking on perspective and brush strokes and techniques; but they didn't seem particularly interested in the character of the individual models, let alone the horses and dogs. No one, to my amazement, spent more than a few seconds in front of the fantastic etching of Freud's lawyer, Lord Goodman — "Adviser to Harold Wilson's government, Mr. Fix-It, Mr. Everybody, Mr. Behind-the-Scenes," as Feaver described him to me — surely one of the great contemporary portraits of a powerful, influential man.
Personally, I rather enjoyed the low-brow, gossipy approach. As Feaver would say, you don't need to know that the perfectly respectable-looking man in the eerie, gorgeously painted double portrait, A Man and His Daughter 1963-4, was actually a safecracker — I thinkthat's what he said — but there's no denying the added interest the information brings, even if it ultimately reinforces Feaver's point: The painting is so good that categories like "safecracker" (or shopkeeper or librarian or prison warden) simply melt away in the sheer tenderness and beauty of the brush strokes.
As the afternoon wore on, the galleries gradually emptied out. Single figures stood motionless in front of portraits of single figures. The docents were gone, the guards looked more relaxed. Not surprisingly, most of them liked the show. Watching over the Sam Durant exhibition, one of them told me, was "enough to give you a migraine."
For a few minutes, I wandered through the rest of the museum. In a room dedicated to "Recent European Paintings," which included a banal work by Chris Ofili, the artist who enraged Rudy Giuliani by exhibiting a painting of the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung, a man in a fedora said to the woman with him, "These things are like nothingcompared to Freud."
"Oh, it's a whole different world," she answered.
