Leigh Bowery

This is a small portrait of the maverick gay performer and nightclub personality, Leigh Bowery, who died in 1994. The extraordinary costumes he created for himself played on fashion, fetishism and carnival aesthetics, which transformed his sixteen stones of flesh into an androgynous spectacle.Freud met him in 1988 and for four years painted him regularly. He was fascinated by Bowery's bulky physique and his awareness of the body as a sculptural object. In this painting, Freud shows him close-up and naked. The vulnerability of the sleeping figure lends the painting a touching intimacy.

Detailed Description This is a small portrait of the maverick gay performer and nightclub personality Leigh Bowery (1961-94). It portrays Bowery's head and naked upper torso framed against dark red upholstery. His bald head rests against his raised left shoulder, his eyes are closed and his cheeks and mouth hang loosely as though he is asleep. Freud's manner of painting emphasises the fleshiness of Bowery's face. This is achieved through the application of paint in different textures - in some areas relatively smooth, in others thickly but delicately built up. Apparently unconscious of the artist's gaze, Bowery has a vulnerable appearance which belies the bulk of his physical form.

Freud was introduced to Bowery by their mutual friend, the artist Cerith Wyn Evans (born 1958), in 1988. He had recently seen Bowery's performance at Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London. In his first public appearance in a fine art context, Bowery posed behind a one way mirror in the gallery for two hours a day over the period of a week. He was dressed in the flamboyant outfits he usually wore in the London nightclubs where he had become a leading figure in the underground scene, known for his outrageous and frequently offensive performances. Born and bred in Australia, he had come to London in 1980 in search of glamour. The extraordinary costumes he created for himself played on fashion, fetishism and carnival aesthetics and transformed his sixteen stones of flesh into an androgynous spectacle. Bowery used his body to construct an identity through which he could express aspects of his personality. This involved moulding and taping his torso, often quite masochistically, as though it were his sculptural material and masking his face or covering it with outlandish makeup. Holes in his cheeks, visible in Freud's portrait, were pierced for the insertion of large safety-pins which would attach fake smiling lips to his face. Freud said of Bowery 'I found him perfectly beautiful' (quoted in Bernard, p.19). He also commented 'the way he edits his body is amazingly aware and amazingly abandoned' (quoted in Feaver, p.43). Bowery said of Freud: 'I love the psychological aspect of his work - in fact I sometimes felt as if I had been undergoing psychoanalysis with him... His work is full of tension. Like me he is interested in the underbelly of things.' (Quoted in Sue Tilley, Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon, London 1997, p.220.)

Bowery posed regularly for Freud over a four year period. Freud's first painting of him was Leigh Bowery (Seated) 1990 (private collection). To accommodate and emphasise Bowery's enormous scale, it was one of the largest paintings Freud had ever made (2437 x 1830mm). In an even larger painting of Bowery, Leigh Under the Skylight 1994 (2972 x 1207mm, collection unknown), the model stands on a draped table towering over the artist and viewer as though he is a monumental sculpture. This contrasts markedly with the majority of Freud's portraits and nudes which are almost exclusively painted looking down at his subject. A notable exception is his self-portrait of 1965, Reflection with Two Children (Self Portrait) (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), in which the artist is represented towering equally over the children in the painting and the viewer in front of it. Freud continued to paint Bowery up until his sudden death of AIDS at the end of 1994. The folds of fat on his torso are rendered with uncompromising honesty. Freud's last portrait of him, Small Head of Leigh Bowery 1995 (collection unknown), completed posthumously, portrays the performer slumped against a pillow, his eyes closed in sleep. In contrast to the earlier portrait, Leigh Bowery, his face is thinner and set in loose folds of flesh, although the bulk of his body is still apparent in the section of his shoulders included within the picture plane.

Freud frames his subjects in the manner of a photographer; they are often viewed close-up and cropped dramatically. His treatment of bodies emphasises the tactile attributes of flesh almost to the point of viscerality. From his earliest paintings, his treatment of nudes was unorthodox and frequently viewed as shocking at the time of their making. At the age of fourteen he had painted a bearded, naked male figure Old Man Running 1936 (collection unknown), an irreverent representation of the patriarch whose nakedness is considered taboo in Western cultures. Man with Rat 1977 (Art Gallery of Western Australia) depicts a red-haired man lounging naked, legs splayed on a sofa and genitals almost painfully exposed, holding a black rat, the tail of which is draped sensuously over his thigh. Freud considers his paintings of nudes to be as much portraits as they refer to the traditional genre of the nude and it is significant that he chose to paint Bowery naked rather than in the costumes through which Bowery expressed his public identity. Rather than glorifying the body, Freud's 'realistic' representation presents it in all the vulnerability of nakedness, emphasising his subject's humanity.

An etched version of Bowery's head and shoulders, Large Head 1993 (Tate P20141), portrays him with his head held erect.

Credit: Presented anonymously 1994