World-class shows for Olympian year

IT'S AS THOUGH the recent and deservedly hyped exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan,which was at the National Gallery London from last November to the beginning of this month, upped the ante for other institutions in the city.

David Hockney: A Bigger Pictureopened at the Royal Academy on January 12th and continues until April 9th, and the superb exhibition Lucian Freud: Portraits, which opened recently at the National Portrait Gallery, runs until the end of May. The Hockney and the Freud exhibitions have both been years in the making; Freud was closely involved in the planning of his exhibition prior to his death last July.

And while all three shows have been promoted on a scale more usually associated with a blockbuster movie or a supergroup than with the world of fine art, the three artists are, to a greater or lesser extent, proven crowd pullers. Leonardo is the archetypal Renaissance genius; Hockney is pretty close to being an English national treasure; and Freud fascinates as a reclusive enigma whose complicated personal life intrigues as much as the extraordinary realism of his figurative paintings.

Taken together, it seems to move the visual arts into a slightly different league, and still in prospect is Tate Modern’s 2012 headliner, timed to coincide with the Olympic Games: a mammoth Damien Hirst survey show, opening in April and running through the summer. Not to be outdone, London’s Serpentine Gallery has scheduled the peerless self-publicist Yoko Ono in the Olympics slot, running from June 21st to September.

It’s encouraging that visual arts have the capacity to draw huge crowds and stimulate lively debate – the Hockney exhibition, for example, regularly features as a subject on newspapers’ letters pages.

To see both it and the Freud suggests that promotion works. There is a fantastic buzz at the Royal Academy, with record bookings and constant crowds. The show is not even a retrospective, though it features a retrospective segment. It’s really about Hockney’s landscape work, mostly in and of Yorkshire, made over the past eight years or so, and a lot of it within the past year. But it also includes a significant quantity of his American landscapes, notably of the Grand Canyon, Mulholland Drive and Yosemite. A good bit of what we see was made on an iPad and, perhaps surprisingly, the iPad works are not only outstandingly good, they are not at all machine-like.

There is a huge amount of work in the exhibition, something that has attracted a measure of adverse comment. But, if you look at the overall nature of what Hockney is doing, such criticism is beside the point. Just consider his show's title. Always an early adapter, the artist loves the technology of image-making. In the 1980s he started making what he called "joiners"; that is, collages of multiple photographic prints making up a single image. There are several in A Bigger Picture. For him, it's a way of drawing with a camera, a means of re-editing a scene.

Similarly, the multiple, sequential views of particular tracts of landscape in Yorkshire, followed through seasonal shifts, offer a dynamic, cumulative vision rather than one comprehensive summary. There’s an appropriate lightness of touch to his way of making marks, which can seem to border on the semi-naive, yet is anything but. The bigger picture that we perceive isn’t a single, overarching image but a sequence of images giving us a sense of the landscape over time. Not that there aren’t nice individual images along the way – there certainly are.

A Bigger Pictureis a bracingly upbeat show, well deserving of its popularity. Hockney's sheer energy is amazing, and laudable, but it's about much more than energy. To suggest that would be to underestimate him. In harnessing not only the technology of digital media but the way it changes the way we see things, he is doing something really significant. Not least, he is showing us that the technology is there for us to use and not vice versa; that we needn't sacrifice the particularity of individual vision and our freedom to articulate it.

THE EXHIBITION Lucian Freud Portraitsis also vast. The preview attracted media coverage throughout Europe. Among its 130-plus paintings, photographs and works on paper are many of the monumental canvases the artist painted of the performance artist Leigh Bowery and of Sue Tilley (Big Sue), described as a "Benefits Supervisor" in the paintings' titles.

Other examples of his largest works include an extremely rare group composition Large Interior, W11 (After Watteau). To bring together all these works from a large number of public and private collections – with a significant number from the Lewis Collection and a "private collection, Ireland" – is a mind-boggling feat of organisation. The results are spectacular.

Even more than previous retrospectives, the exhibition should clinch Freud’s position as one of the most important figurative artists of the 20th century.

As with Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon, his world seems to have been located in the studio, in his case a usually spartan, slightly run-down domestic interior with the bare minimum in the way of props or furnishings, and a growing pile of paint-stained rags that features regularly in the paintings.

For him and for each individual subject the working process was, famously, a marathon feat of endurance. He demanded long-term commitment from his sitters, no matter how rich or famous – or how poor, for that matter. The sheer duration influenced the form of the paintings. From early on, Freud didn’t so much make a likeness of something or someone as lay siege and keep going until he achieved a kind of equivalent of the person or the thing in paint.

Often you look at a painting and wonder how, in the midst of a veritable maelstrom of agitated colours and marks you can, uncannily, get the sense not only of a living person but of an entire personal history.

Freud’s sustained and intensive looking paid dividends in this respect. It’s as if he wore his subjects down, overcoming their emotional defences. This could be interpreted as a form of cruelty, as when he intently rendered every blip and blemish of an exposed body, moving beyond the conventions of the artistic nude to the naked person. And by all accounts he could be, in his dealings with people, emotionally manipulative. Yet in the end one would have to say that when it comes to the paintings, it’s not about cruelty, it’s about arriving at an accurate, truthful account of human beings.

Virtually every subject, then, is tragic: mortal, uncertain, worn down by life, haunted by losses and hurts, vulnerable and wary. But this is not to ignore or discount beauty, bravery and hope. Guessing the identity of Freud’s subjects used to be a popular pursuit. They were rarely identified when the paintings were exhibited. Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, for example, painted over a two-year period from 1983 to 1985, is simply Man in a Chair.

Some years ago, Vanity Fairran a piece putting together clues and identifying a large number of sitters, most of them involved in one way or another in Freud's exceptionally complex personal life. The show's curator, Sarah Howgate, had to face up to this question of identifying sitters. In some cases it isn't an issue – some sitters such as Leigh Bowery are well known – but others, Howgate notes, "prefer to hold on to their anonymity. Lucian Freud Portraitsis a life represented in paint rather than a biographical retrospective." Still, by putting names to faces, the exhibition goes farther than any previous one.

They include such luminaries as the baron, as well as Freud’s first wife, Kathleen Garman; his second wife, Caroline Blackwood; his lover Suzy Boyt, and Isobel, the first daughter she had with Freud; Bacon’s lover, George Dyer; Bernadine Coverley, the mother of Bella and Esther Freud; and the painter Celia Paul, a regular subject. The artist’s mother has consistently been identified as the subject of a number of superb paintings. David Hockney reckons that Freud’s small painting of him, completed in 2002, took 130 hours’ work. It is terrific. When Hockney suggested he return the favour and sit for him, Freud gave him all of two-and-a-half hours.

Sometimes there’s a presumption that when an artist is good at one thing that skill or talent will extend into other areas, but more often than not expertise is surprisingly narrow in scope. Freud was a brilliant painter with a daunting number of out-and-out masterpieces to his credit, but he couldn’t really create a good composition in any conventional sense. To say so is not to try to diminish him in any way. He didn’t need to make compositions to get to what he did best. He was most comfortable with a centrally positioned single subject, a fact that makes a show of his portraits all the more pertinent. There simply won’t be a better, more engrossing show this year.

David Hockney: A Bigger Pictureis at the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, until April 9th. See royalacademy.org.uk/events

Lucian Freud Portraitsis at the National Portrait Gallery, St Martin's Place, London, until May 27th. See npg.org.uk