Today’s post is TLS-focused, beginning with more poetic cover versions—this time of Philip Larkin—plus the latest dispatch from our Pleistocene ancestors:
The Neanderthals live on only in [our] DNA—they vanished about 40,000 years ago—but though we’re probably responsible for their demise, there is no sign of violent ethnic cleansing. In fact, whatever Steven Pinker says, we were pretty pacific until the Neolithic, when there were farms to fail and neighbouring farmers to raid.
The same issue joins a conversation started here, if only in passing, about the British artist Lucian Freud. Peter Schjeldahl was unimpressed:
A lot of people need Lucian Freud to be a great artist. How else to explain the furor for the pretty good English portrait and figure painter?
But he was equally unimpressed by a frequent complaint:
To tax Freud with misogyny seems pointless, given that he obviously despises and in some sense wants to fuck everybody, himself included.
Reviewing Freud’s letters, along with a new exhibition at the National Gallery, the poet Craig Raine joins the case for the defence:
This is a common criticism of Freud’s nudes—that they are pitiless and misogynist. I think these criticisms are fundamentally sentimental and in denial. I set against them a remark of Freud’s quoted in Volume Two of [William] Feaver’s biography: “I’m so fond of navels”. To anyone who isn’t disabled by prudery, Freud’s interest in genitals, in nipples, in belly-buttons, in bodies, is perfectly normal. No one is not interested.
Raine differs from Schjeldahl in his reverence for Freud’s achievement. Though his review is not uncritical, an editor could have titled it “I Love Lucian.”
Absurdly enough, the biographer cited by Raine—William Feaver—was married for a time to Victoria Turton, a.k.a. Vicki Feaver, whose poem “Naked Girl with Eggs” is one of the more compelling statements of the protest Raine and Schjeldahl hope to deflect. Feaver enters the mind of Freud’s model, pondering the eggs he placed beside her bed:
what could be homelier, or more comforting, than to dip toast soldiers into soft yellow yolks? Yet she thinks of a day on the moors when she trod on a curlew’s nest, and of herself posed on the black coverlet to satisfy something—still loose in the world—that likes nothing better than to be fed on a naked girl with two fried eggs.
Interesting review