Aesthetic review and appraisal of "Big Sam"

The Belgian artist Hetty Liebelt was born in Antwerp in 1950 and gained a degree at the University for Graphic Arts in this city, where she paints predominantly in acrylic and oil. Her subjects are representational and encompass a broad spectrum – from architecture to landscapes, objects, still-lifes and figures. She tends to be regarded as a reticent artist, and certainly does not succumb to the brazenly mercenary level of the contemporary art market.

In the work just completed in 2009 – a reaction to Lucian Freud's 1995 painting "Big Sue" – she reveals a psychological, fine and in-depth feeling for the human figure.

A subject such as "Big Sam" must initially induce irritation in the observer, due to the deliberately opulent figure. The customary visual conventions of consumers of art are shattered by the lovingly portrayed mass of the voluminous figure. The life-size male nude is recorded with unashamed realism, and at first sight seems to typify the decadences of the modern movement. His enormous physicality is nevertheless not conveyed in a blatantly expressive manner, rather it is depicted with care and extreme restraint. 

Hetty Liebelt clearly views her model with reserved tenderness. From the perspective of the art historian, in her treatment of the model's body the artist displays a predilection for the stylistic epoch of mannerism and the baroque. Michelangelo and Rubens, who place their artistic stress on muscular power and expansive corporeal volume, are Liebelt's associative forerunners in her creation of the physicality of "Big Sam".

"Big Sam" is a "three-hundred-pound-man" in tranquillity, full of confidence he reposes, like a male Venus, on a sofa showing signs of its imminent demise – he is a sleepy nude posing for a portrait. The disintegrating sofa may be interpreted here as a kind of soulignement or metaphor for the male nude model. The transience and decomposition of man ("nature morte") and the disintegration of the furniture act as counterpoints.

Each individual fold of the corpulent man is rendered with realistic depth. Hetty Liebelt here employs an exceptionally spare tonal palette in which monochrome greys predominate. The restraint of the colour heightens the figure's dimensionality.

Certainly female nudes have already been explored in contemporary art in every form, right up to the fleshy bodies of Fernando Botero or Lucian Freud,  but male nudes even today are frequently presented as ideals, and often enough from a man's viewpoint.

Hetty Liebelt as an artist has developed in her "Big Sam" painting an artistically defined affection for the baroque males of modernity. This man is at rest, proudly and peacefully, like a endearing Buddha figure. Liebelt has created the counterpart to Lucian Freud's "Big Sue". Her painter's viewpoint does not depict the figure with the hardness, brutality and excess maybe of Lucian Freud, on the contrary she lends her subject softness and buoyancy, there is no expressiveness, rather objectivity and sensibility. This obviously differentiates the female from the male eye. 

The differentiated and gender-specific viewpoints of the two works of art – with their similar subjects but entirely different contents – is an extremely dramatic demonstration of the psychology of perception. Whereas Freud's depiction of "Big Sue" (Susan Tilley, 51) seems hard and corrosive, exposing like an x-ray her decadent weightiness and stressing her individual femininity and sexuality, through Sue Tilley`s grasp of her right breast, Liebelt's interpretation in "Big Sam" (Klaus Busch, 32) maintains a calm distance from the model. The painting process shows no signs of intoxicated aggression.

While Lucian Freud can be transported into a state of artistic intoxication by his model, Hetty Liebelt remains in a state of sensual but nevertheless objective contemplation. She approaches a philosophical level, and consequently imbues the "Big Sam" figure with a tranquil grandeur, whereas Freud reaches into the feminine intimacy, heightening the effect of the rosy, fleshy and expressively painted persona.

Contrasting the work "Big Sam", 2009, painted by Hetty Liebelt, with Lucian Freud's "Big Sue", 1995, can lead one to a fascinating, perhaps even a sexually defined conclusion. In terms of the psychology of perception Hetty Liebelt's painter's eye is more restrained, maybe even more sensual and less sexistic in regard to her model. Freud devours his model with all his five senses, in a Faustian, radical and unmistakeably masculine manner. Everything is portrayed more drastically and extremely.

If Lucian Freud's art aims at being more extraverted, perhaps involuntarily at arousing the observer's indignation, Liebelt is concerned in "Big Sam" with the figure's withdrawn nature, its peaceful repose.

The artist Hetty Liebelt demonstrates in "Big Sam" her aloof and dreamlike perception of a reclining and meditating man in somnolence, and viewed with perfect respect. The viewer experiences a sustained sensation of sympathy, amiability and ease, in spite of or even due to the corpulent body.

Liebelt exhibits a measured degree of sensibility and experience in her observation and psychological penetration of the model. In contrast to the British artist Lucian Freud she displays a differentiated and contrary attitude towards portraiture, she aims less at an artistic emphasis of close and tangible individuality, and so lends "Big Sam" a communing, remote, virtually deistic unapproachabilty.

The artist's courage in her response to Lucian Freud's "Big Sue" demonstrates on the one hand a portion of wit and humour, on the other an aesthetic application of the language of enchantment and unembarrassed mystery with which she auratically cloaks her model.

Dr. phil. Hubertus Schlenke

Köln, im Herbst 2009