Programme 13: Beautiful People?

The Art Works

Title: Standing by the Rags
Artist: Lucian Freud
Medium: Oil on canvas
Date: 1988–9

A naked woman is standing slumped next to a pile of rags with one of her arms resting on it. She has not been flattered; the flesh is pale and lumpy, and indeed the artist, Lucian Freud (born 1922), has often been accused of treating his models like lumps of meat. Freud would have used the rags to wipe paint from his paintbrush, and this enhances the feeling that the model is almost part of his studio equipment rather than a living person. But however it might appear, he is very much interested in people as individuals and what they actually look like, rather than trying to flatter them and show an idealised image that he does not see. He is a master at distinguishing different textures, and here excels in the description of the rags, the flesh, the hair and the wooden floor.

Title: Condition of Woman I
Artist: Arman
Medium: Mixed media, metal, wood and glass
Date: 1960

In this work Arman (born 1928) has created a portrait of his wife not by showing us an image of her, but by showing us what she has used. It is often said of us that we are what we eat, but the things we do and the things we use also define our characters clearly. All of the objects in the glass case have been used by his wife – they were the contents of a wastepaper bin in her bathroom. They could help to give us an image of what she is like, even if it is not what she looks like. As this is rubbish (quite literally – they are after all things she has thrown away) this may not seem like a flattering portrait.

Title: Self-Portrait (Frieze No2, Four Panels)
Artist: John Coplans
Medium: Photograph on paper
Date: 1994

John Coplans (born 1920) uses photographs of himself to confront what has been termed ‘body fascism’ – the idea that in order to be happy we have to have the perfect body: young, slim, smooth and toned. The majority of the population are just not like that. He creates almost sculptural forms by contorting his body into weird shapes. By photographing these postures he allows us to look at the body from this unusual point of view, thinking in terms of the shapes it makes rather than in terms of its function. In the four panels of the frieze his poses deliberately echo classical sculpture in order to create an ironic comment on its idealised forms.