Lovers lying two and two
Ask not whom they sleep beside and the bridegroom all the night through never turns him to the bride.
The big man is Leigh Bowery a fearless Australian-born performance artist who became Lucian Freud’s favorite model. The woman beside him Nicola Bate man, his collaborator and seamstress and late , his wife
But we don’t have to know their names. As a painter Freud is interested not in who but rather how people are how they sprawl sag stare and bear up when exposed to the painter’s gaze
The title borrowed from houseman’s poem turns the painting into something of puzzle : A wedding night? In Freud is studio? Did things well or badly? But the sheer bulk of Bowery, in this intravenously tipped room is the real source of tension. If he turn over in bed surely he and bate man will tumble right out into space