Evans is a place on Earth: The Violent Beauty of Flesh:Lucian Freud's Self-Portraits @ the RA.

"I want paint to work as flesh" - Lucian Freud.

If the recent Lucian Freud exhibition of self-portraits at the Royal Academy proves anything it's that Freud's quote about wanting paint to work as flesh was no idle boast. It wasn't an ambition or an aspiration. It was, more and more so as his career developed, an actuality. Even more so than his more abstract minded fellow traveller Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud brought flesh to life with his painting in all its corporeal ugliness and violent beauty.

Artists have, for centuries, painted images of themselves. Their own bodies are their most readily available models and your own body stays with you, unlike lovers and friends, all your life. Freud drew more self-portraits than most and the RA have collected a mixed bag of them with dates spreading from the early forties to the start of this millennium (Freud died, aged 88, in July 2011).

Sixty years of Freud's slowly changing face portrayed in his slowly evolving style. There are works in ink, gouache, oil, crayon, and pencil and there are direct face on portraits, profiles, double portraits, portraits that tell a story, and even paintings of family members and friends that while acting as portraits of others reveal a lot about how Lucian Freud saw himself.

Man's Head (Self-portrait I) (1963)

Despite all that, it's a pretty easy show to take in. Held in the RA's upper galleries, I whipped round it pretty rapidly and would have done so in even shorter time had it not been so crowded (he pulls the crowds in, does Freud). It was full of great stuff but it did take a little while to get going. The first room contains works from the 1940s (his mother had arranged for him to be included in an exhibition of children's drawing in London's Guggenheim Jeune gallery in 1938) and you can see how, even within that one decade, his style became more pared down, more economic, and, essentially, sharper.

Some of the works were conceived as book illustrations and with these we're introduced to classical allusions and roles that would later develop into a style in which Freud was able to tell a story, or at least nudge you towards inventing your own, with one painting. The quality of Freud's 'line' and draughtsmanship at such a young age led the critic Herbert Read to label him the 'Ingres of Existentialism' while other made comparisons to artists of the German Renaissance.

I'd not had Freud down as an Albrecht Durer or a Matthias Grunewald but there you go. You learn stuff at these art galleries. Early works see Freud experimenting with competing, and quite different, styles. Scribbly drawings vied with emotive close up direct gaze paintings as Freud tried to find his feet not just as an accomplished artist but one with his own style.

Self-portrait (1940)

Man with a Feather (Self-portrait) (1943)

It was when he started combining these two techniques and imbuing them with an earthy, yet quietly radical, feel that owed more to the likes of Cezanne and Van Gogh than they did Durer that Freud really became the artist so revered today. But back in the mid-forties, it seems, it was the narrative element of his work that was coming to the fore.

In Man with a Feather, Freud's first 'major' self-portrait and one which was exhibited at his first solo show in London, the eye is drawn as much to the silhouetted figures in the brightly coloured house in the background as it is to the titular feather and Freud himself. The feather was given to Freud by Lorna Wishart, his first serious girlfriend. He holds it in his left hand, possibly because it's the hand he painted with.

Soon paintings would follow in which Freud posed himself with thistles and hyacinth pots as if demanding the viewer considers why. Others were intended for use in a book of Greek myths but were rejected by the publisher. Freud depicts himself as Actaeon who, in mythology, was turned into a stag after accidentally witnessing Diana the moon goddess bathing. It allowed Freud to show off his knowledge of Titian, who in 1556-69 painted the scene in much fuller and more colourful fashion, while also highlighting his own lascivious nature.

A lover to rival Picasso or even Casanova, Freud is known to have had at least fourteen children - and some estimates have put the actual number at forty (I doubt even Boris fucking Johnson has knocked that many sprogs out). His portrait of himself as Actaeon makes me think we should probably ignore the fake, crocodile, tears and look, instead, to the horns on his head. Lucian Freud has literally drawn himself as horny. A stag ready to rut.

Self-portrait as Actaeon (1949)

Self-portrait with Hyacinth Pot (1947-48)

Flyda and Arvid (1947)

Man at Night (Self-Portrait) (1947-48)

Man with a Thistle (Self-portrait) (1946)

It's amazing he found time to do any art. But he did. Lots of it. As the forties moved into the fifties he switched his emphasis from drawing to painting. Initially he would paint sitting down (after all that shagging he was probably knackered) but soon he'd change his approach. "My eyes were completely going mad" he said about working while "sitting down not being able to move", and to free himself from this stifling situation he took to standing behind his easel.

His work, perhaps unsurprisingly, became more physical too. With Auerbach and Francis Bacon, Freud was resisting the trend of Abstract Expressionism (as they later did with conceptual and other forms of more experimental art) but it still seems as if something from that world was starting to imbue his imagery. While his art remained resolutely figurative the brush strokes became broader and blockier, the paintings less linear and defined, and the symbolism of earlier works were traded in for direct, often harsh, and accurate observation of the human form.

His art, it seemed, had started to breathe. It had not only started to breathe. It had started to sweat, fart, belch, and ejaculate. Unfinished works on display show how Freud began with loose charcoal outlines before building up the face from its centre, working outwards. The different shades and colours that make up all our faces seem to have fascinated him and when an argument with a cabbie resulted in him getting a shiner instead of holding a raw steak to it he rushed back to his studio to capture the unique and transitory muted rainbow of colour that had developed.

Self-portrait (c.1956)

Self-portrait with a Black Eye (1978)

Self-portrait (1974)

Hotel Bedroom (1954)

Compare these later paintings with 1954's Hotel Bedroom. It's the last painting Freud made while sitting down and its stiffness reflects the tension and the sense of remove between the two subjects. Former lovers who now seem to be separated emotionally, by an ever widening abyss. The estrangement between Freud and his then wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood - a Guinness heiress and writer, is writ so large that contemporary observers (and Caroline herself) considered the work cruel.

Possibly. But it's truthful. By 1959, Freud and Blackwood had divorced and by that time his painting had become nearly as harsh as the way he seems to have casually discarded love interests when someone new came along. Freud's work was now less interested in showing what things looked like and more about showing what things really are. Another trick, that to my mind, he may have learned from Cezanne.

Self-portrait with unrelated notes

Freud had always preferred to paint his likeness using mirrors instead of photographs, citing a better quality of light. With some of his paintings this is more obvious than others. Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait and Diego Velazquez's Las Meninas were historical precedents for a painting like Small Interior in which we see the painter, then in his prime, looking back at us and returning our gaze via a mirror.

It's a bit of an outlier in Freud's canon because it's surprisingly playful, even a little twee. But, elsewhere, Freud utilises mirrors in more sinister, and more original, ways. Distances between sitter and artist are explored but so are the emotional distances between people, even lovers and family members.

Hotel Bedroom does this in a striking, overt, and quite obvious fashion but a work like Reflection with Two Children relegates a brace of his multiple offspring to very minor, background, positions. Most people would consider the birth, and the existence, of their children to be one of the most important things in their life, possibly the most important, and something that would surely belong in the forefront of both their mind and art. But Freud looms large over these little, almost insignificant, people in a painting that was, and I don't know how much you'd care to read into this, inspired by the design of an Egyptian tombstone.

Small Interior (1968-72)

Hand Mirror on Chair (1966)

Self-portrait Reflection, Fragment (c.1963)

Reflection with Two Children (Self-portrait) (1965)

It's either a shockingly arrogant demonstration of his own ego (and fruitful loins) or, hopefully, a bold satire on his perceived image. Rendered in muted muddy tones and with what appears to be a worm's eye view of the sitters it's such a bizarre image that, after a while, the lightbulb and lampshade start to resemble a UFO.

Otherworldliness within a very real, and absolutely physical, world. That seems to be what Freud did. To realise that to be extra ordinary is to be extraordinary and to show that in paintings that will reap rewards with return visits. He places himself behind, and obscured by, a houseplant, towering over his kids, reflected in a mirror, and with a black eye and yet the paintings are never vain. In his self-portraiture, if perhaps not his life, Lucian Freud is merely a man and the easiest one for him to access as a model.

Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening (Self-portrait) (1967-68)

In that respect he's not so different to Antony Gormley but while Gormley has claimed, in the past, that the fact his casts are based on his own dimensions is not meant to indicate his art is all about himself (he's just an 'everyman', apparently), Freud is on record as thinking and acting quite differently.

"My work is purely autobiographical. It's about myself and my surroundings" doesn't leave much room for debate and could, if you wanted to take it that way, sound full of hubris. But, truth be told, we see everything with our own eyes, we hear everything with our own hands, we feel everything with our own hands, and we love and hate with our own hearts and souls. None of us can truly know how another person is feeling and it's not just imperative that we do, but it's impossible not to, experience life through the prism of our own confused and tortured existence.

Even when Freud paints others, more often than not unclothed, the resultant works are, in some ways, self-portraits. We're not so much seeing what his son Freddy or his sitter Flora look like or even how they feel they look as we're seeing how Freud views them. Overtly, and to some problematically, sexually it seems.

Freddy's got a fair sized ol' dick on him and Flora depicts a young woman Freud noticed in a restaurant not long before he turned eighty. The shadowy semi circle obscuring the lower level of bed linen is Freud's own head scrutinising Flora while, at the same time, reminding us this isn't really about Flora, her blue toenails, her boobs, or her bush. It is, as ever, about Lucian Freud.

The awkward pose she holds and sustained over a lengthy period so that Freud could paint her resulted in her having to undergo osteopathic treatment. Allowing someone to pose for so long it necessitates a hospital visit and displaying imagery of your naked family (Freud painted some of his daughters as well as Freddy). It's no wonder some were shocked by both his work and behaviour. Not least because they are quite shocking. But they're also highly accomplished and innovative artworks. In the case of Lucian Freud, it seems, there are times when you really do need to separate the art from the man.

Freddy Standing (2000-01)

Naked Portrait with Reflection (1980)

Flora with Blue Toenails (2000-01)

Two Irishmen in W11 (1984-85)

I get the impression I admire him much more as an artist as I would have done as a man. He's hardly unique in that, and this show of self-portraits acted, more than a similar one of another artists's self-portraits would, as a reasonably comprehensive look at how Freud worked, what he did, and why he did it. For an artist who saw all his work as a self-portrait anyway, the show's title Lucian Freud:The Self-portraits was something of a tautology.

His art, though repetitive in many ways, has nothing tautological about it. Themes, motifs, other people, and, of course, Lucian Freud himself repeat, disappear, reappear, get riffed on, evolve, and sometimes undergo revolutions but, unlike an essential tautology, Freud's work is never pointless. As Freud grew more revered and became more of an elder statesmen (and as the number of his offspring continued to rise) he seemed, also, to grow in something he was not short of in the first place. Confidence. But the confidence was never displaced, it wasn't arrogance. It was the confidence of a man who knew he had it in him to become one of the great artists of his time and through hard work, perseverance, and a steeliness that could be taken as cruelty, he achieved that.

Later self-portraits show Freud looking lined, crumpled, and drawn in the face. One even makes him look like a cross between Billy Bragg and Jeremy Corbyn (a socialist's wet dream). Yet, still, the desire and resolve to edge his portraiture, his art, and his story forward strikes the viewer. The one image at the RA not by Freud himself is a photography of the randy old goat taken by David Dawson in which, captured as if to look as if the subject was unaware, he looks out at us as if to say 'you think you know me, you think you know what I look like. But you will only ever know as much about me as I want you to know'. The phrase 'hiding in plain sight' is bandied about far too readily these days but the mysterious and mundane greatness of Freud is to simultaneously hide and reveal itself right in front of our eyes. Nice one, RA.