Freud depicted gay men quite a lot across his career.
He was asked about this a number of times,
and in one of the interviews he responded that he was drawn to queers
for their courage.
His portraits of gay men emerged kind of at a particularly anxious
and transitional moment, I think, for gay relationships in Britain.
And there are a couple of examples of these paintings in the exhibition,
thereís 'Naked Man with his Friend'
and 'Two Men' as well.
And that latter work emerges just as a piece of legislation
called Section 28 comes into law.
This legislation stops local authorities from promoting
homosexuality, and it denigrates gay and lesbian relationships
as pretended family relationships.
Like a lot of Freud's paintings, these works would have been painted over
weeks, months, even years.
He would take time, kind of, arranging these subjects, and time painting them as well.
He would apply brushstroke one-by-one to the paintings as well,
wiping his brush after each one.
So this shows a really kind of prolonged, engaged engagement with these sitters,
and taking real care to depict them.
So another painting that thinks about queer relationships in a particular way
is a painting called 'And The Bridegroom' from 1993.
This painting shows Leigh Bowery,
who was performance artist, and who identified as a gay man
with his friend and collaborator, Nicola Bateman.
Bowery and Bateman would get married a year later,
after this painting was finished.
I think he's trying to underline the intimacy and unconventionality
of this relationship
with the title 'And the Bridegroom', which is taken from an A.E. Housman poem.
It's, I think, a kind of humorous comment
on the way that these two figures
are kind of behaving almost like a heterosexual married couple,
but are very much not a heterosexual married couple, as well,
but also showing the kind of depth of understanding and intimacy that he has
of this relationship, at the same time.
Freud encountered Bowery, I think, a few times before he started painting him.
I think he saw him around London a little bit,
and he also went along, through a mutual friend, to Taboo,
which was a nightclub, that Bowery ran and performed at.
The artistic relationship that develops between them is a highly collaborative one.
It was Bowery's choice to pose nude.
It was not something that Freud asked him to do.
And it was often Bowery that suggested or got into the poses
that we see in the paintings of him.
The Bowery paintings are significant, I think, for the way that they were produced
in the first decade still of the HIV AIDS crisis.
These paintings do not at all really adhere to mainstream
representations of people with AIDS, or gay men more generally, at this moment.
He is kind of performing in a very camp way,
his body is large and healthy, and this is commented on
numerous times, often in quite derogatory ways.
I don't think that we can think about these paintings as intentionally
seeking to counteract those kind of discussions and discourses,
but they are really powerful, kind of close engagements
with a gay male body,
at a moment when gay male bodies were being pushed
to the margins of society and ostracised.
You can see the really close attention that Freud has given to Boweryís skin, to his form,
his body, his back,
almost as if he's kind of Bowery's partner,
kind of gazing on it, in that way.
Freud met Sue Tilley through Leigh Bowery.
Freud's paintings of Tilley become extremely famous, very, very quickly
in the mid-1990s, almost as soon as they're exhibited.
And one of the reasons I think for this,
is because of Freud's use of Tilley's job title in the title of the paintings,
he doesn't refer to her by name. He refers to her as 'Benefits Supervisor' in many of these works,
such as 'Benefits Supervisor Resting' from 1994.
And that was Tilley's job,
she worked at the Job Centre, helping people sign on for benefits, and things like that.
Critics start to hone in on Tilleyís job, and they start to conflate Tilley,
partly because of the way she presents herself in these images,
I think, with benefits claimants,
and with working class women in general.
I think this tells us quite a lot
about kind of critics' preoccupations and people's preoccupations in the mid-1990s
about class and gender.
If you look at a work like 'Sleeping by the Lion Carpet',
like the Bowery works,
and like the works of gay male couples, as well,
these works are very intimate, theyíre very affectionate,
theyíre very careful and generous as well.
I'm particularly struck in this work, by the way,
when you look at the Lion carpet in the background,
you can see a sleeping lion watched over by a lioness who is wide awake.
It's interesting, then, to look at Freud and Tilley in the foreground.
Tilley is the lioness who is asleep, and Freud is the lion keeping watch over her.