"A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure"
About this Quote
Freud’s line lands with the cool shock of a confession: the painter as sanctioned thief, turning the world into raw material for appetite. Coming from an artist notorious for unflinching portraits that make flesh feel almost confrontational, it’s less a romantic ode to “seeing” than a statement about power. To paint, in this view, is to claim. Not to admire reality, not to honor it, but to annex it.
The phrasing matters. “Must” makes it a discipline, not a temperament. He isn’t describing a cute quirk of creatives; he’s prescribing a working ethic that overrides ordinary social contracts. “Everything he sees” expands the license beyond the studio model to the entire field of life, implying that no encounter is innocent. “Entirely” is the bluntest word in the sentence: totalizing, a refusal of shared ownership. Whatever dignity, privacy, or autonomy the subject imagines they have becomes secondary to the painter’s need.
That subtext fits Freud’s mid-to-late 20th century context, when figurative painting had to justify itself against abstraction and conceptual art. His answer is not theory but hunger. Painting survives, he suggests, by being unsentimental: it feeds on looking, and looking is never neutral. There’s also a sneaky defensiveness here, as if he’s preempting moral critique of his gaze by naming it outright. If art is “use and pleasure,” the transaction is honest, if not exactly kind. The provocation is the point: creativity, for Freud, isn’t empathy first; it’s possession, then craft.
The phrasing matters. “Must” makes it a discipline, not a temperament. He isn’t describing a cute quirk of creatives; he’s prescribing a working ethic that overrides ordinary social contracts. “Everything he sees” expands the license beyond the studio model to the entire field of life, implying that no encounter is innocent. “Entirely” is the bluntest word in the sentence: totalizing, a refusal of shared ownership. Whatever dignity, privacy, or autonomy the subject imagines they have becomes secondary to the painter’s need.
That subtext fits Freud’s mid-to-late 20th century context, when figurative painting had to justify itself against abstraction and conceptual art. His answer is not theory but hunger. Painting survives, he suggests, by being unsentimental: it feeds on looking, and looking is never neutral. There’s also a sneaky defensiveness here, as if he’s preempting moral critique of his gaze by naming it outright. If art is “use and pleasure,” the transaction is honest, if not exactly kind. The provocation is the point: creativity, for Freud, isn’t empathy first; it’s possession, then craft.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|
More Quotes by Lucian
Add to List
