The late artist should be celebrated not just for his paintings, but for sticking it to the body fascists
It says something about Lucian Freud, who died last week, that his name, turned adjective, is never going to make it into the pantheon of modern euphemisms for "we secretly think you're fat, but we're not allowed to say that, so we'll use an art reference instead". Other artists managed it, Rubens being the runaway winner. If Christina Hendricks (Joan from Mad Men) had a dollar for every time she was patronised as "Rubenesque", she could give up acting and spend the rest of her days lying by swimming pools in bikinis made of diamonds.
However, in terms of celeb-speak, Freud blew it big time by painting big people with love and honesty instead of hate and condescension. He painted flesh as it really is, instead of the tidy, firm, prepubescent, plasticised matter society demands it must be. Which is why Freud ? or Freudesque ? never made it into the exalted heights of celeb-cum-fashion-cum-media lingo.
Odd, then, that when Freud painted naked big people, such as Sue Tilley, from the �17m-selling work Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, or the performance artist Leigh Bowery, he would sometimes be criticised for exploiting them, cruelly turning them into circus show grotesques. Actually, the opposite seemed true.
If anything, it was celebrities, the adored, famous and thin, who came off badly in Freud's studio. The naked Kate Moss looks like she's fallen on to a beanbag at a really boring swingers' party. The Queen resembles some depressed woman in a care home who never gets any visitors and has had a crown placed on her head to give the staff a laugh.
Freud's self-portraits were the most unforgiving of all: haggard and glaring, he often resembled a pederast startled in the process of searching for internet porn. Only Jerry Hall looks vulnerable and beautiful, maybe because she was heavily pregnant and not "Demi Moore Vanity Fair cover!" airbrushed-pregnant, rather a swollen, "Mick's on tour again", cheesed-off real kind of pregnant.
I don't want to cry over Freud too much. I've read that when Hall missed a few sittings, he sent her drawings of herself with bodily fluids shooting out of all her orifices. (Do I sense that he might have had some issues?) Moreover, as a male artist of a certain stature, even when criticised, he was taken very seriously, whereas the amazing Beryl Cook's spirited, warm "fat ladies" were too often dismissed as little more than seaside postcards.
However, even those, like me, who know little about art should thank Freud for unwittingly sticking it to body fascism. I say unwittingly because clearly he had no agenda. He simply viewed his corpulent sitters as more interesting to paint than the less corpulent, just as maybe a lush foliage is more interesting to some landscape artists than tarmac or concrete.
He saw humanity and truth in lots (and lots) of human flesh ?and these days that carries a resonance far beyond the art world.
We are living in thin-centric times when even male anorexia is on the rise, and if a woman is famous she must succumb to a flesh version of Crimewatch. (Fatwatch: will the newly thin Pauline Quirke reoffend with fatness again?) Bearing this in mind, it's maybe not so surprising that some might find Freud's paintings shocking. Here are people committing what is, in modern terms, a criminal act ? being big ? and he's not even bothered to pretty them up.
Far from any kind of thin-centric exploitation of his subjects, Freud's method inadvertently held up a mirror to society's growing paranoia and disgust about flesh. The fact that he was ever denounced as some kind of artistic "chubby chaser" says far more about us than it did about him.
When British decency is not enough
There are to be firmer guidelines about female genital mutilation. Which is timely because summer is the season when significant numbers of British girls are taken away, ostensibly for holidays, but really to travel to Africa, the Middle East and parts of the Far East to be circumcised.
In theory, this is illegal and carries 14 years of imprisonment, but in practice, while 22,000 girls are at risk each year, there have been no UK convictions. That's zero, zilch, nada, though there is plenty of heartbreaking anecdotal evidence about happy, carefree girls going on "holiday" and returning depressed and introverted.
To their credit, everyone ? from government ministers to children's groups ? wants to secure convictions, as well as give assistance to victims and raise greater awareness. What may also need to happen is that British people en masse have to stop panicking about anything with "religious" attached.
There still seems to be this embarrassment about female circumcision, because not only is it is a "religious thing", it is often affiliated with religions the majority of us know little about. Bizarrely, it's as if we know our ground speaking out about "white" religious extremes, such as polygamy in Utah, but when it comes to anything "ethnic", or "other", there is a tendency to freeze.
Ironically, this hesitation to condemn comes from a good place ? the part of the British psyche that rightly prides itself on respecting other cultures. However, female circumcision needs to be stripped of its religious trappings and exposed for what is ? the mutilation and assault of defenceless girls. These are British children, our children, and we should be protecting them properly. Our respect for other cultures is the best part of us ? but taken too literally, in this context, it does not help these girls.
The curry that tikkas all the boxes
Tikka masala, long vaunted as Britain's favourite curry, has come eighth in a poll, which was topped by the far hotter jalfrezi. As the poll was in Chaat! magazine (the in-house publication of the British Curry Club), this is hardly surprising. People who love curry so much that they join clubs are unlikely to pick the bastardised dish, invented in Glasgow, which entailed adding Campbell'scorrect tomato soup to placate the weedy UK palate.
Arguably, all this poll proves is that tikka masala did its job well. Curry in Britain is a tale of two halves. On the one hand, there is the common weekend sight of groups of lager-swilling males, scarfing curries so hot their internal organs melt, as they gulp water straight from the jug and beg waiters to turn the fire extinguisher on them.
However, there are others, including me, for whom curry eating is not an extreme sport. My curry journey started with vegetable korma, moving on to the reckless spiced heights of, erm, mild vegetable curry, perhaps with a samosa if I was feeling "really crazy" (OK, fine, you guessed it, I'm a heat-wimp).
But even those daredevils who end up progressing to jalfrezi, madras or, dare I say, the Indian pudding menu, have to start somewhere.
For many, the foothills of their Indian journey would have been the tikka masala. The vast majority of Britons couldn't cope straight off with authentic Indian food, which is why the mighty TM has always had a role to play. Mock its sticky, sickly inauthenticity all you like but for many over the years it has acted as a gateway dish for the wide-ranging delights of Indian cuisine. This is an achievement in itself.
Glasgow, the entire British Isles owes you a belated apology.
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