Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews the major retrospective of Lucian Freud's paintings, just opened at the Hayward Gallery

IN A RARE television interview screened on yesterday's Review (BBC 2), Lucian Freud hardly the most outgoing of artists was in characteristically terse form.'He made one concession to public opinion: "Naturally, because there is a megalomaniacal side to all artists, I hope people will respond to my work." But the bottom line was that he doesn't "care at all" what they think of it.

Those associated with the large and extremely impressive Freud retrospective that arrived at the Hay-ward last week take a rather different view. This touring show (it has been to Washington and Paris, and will travel to Berlin) is not just another art exhi-bition; it is presented as a milestone in cultural history. Robert Hughes has written the catalogue introduction, in which he makes no bones about what he considers to be Freud's crucial importance in an age of terminal aesthetic decline. Hughes's Freud,"the greatest living realist painter", is cast as a heroic modern Canute, holding back the tide that threatens The End Of Visual Culture As We Know It.

Freud's intense realism, in Hughes's view, offers a last lifeline back to authenticity. It suggests "not 'empty value' but lived experience of the world"; it has the power to "give that experience stable form, measure and structure; and so release it, transformed, into one mind at a time ..." Freud's art gives us back the world.

But all paintings, and Freud's are no exception, are the product of deliberation, of artifice, the results of a hundred decisions of mind, hand and eye. Freud's art implicitly acknowledges the realist fallacy the pitfalls of the Pygmalion complex by developing from one kind of "realism" to another.

His prime subject is, always, the human form. Early Freud goes for microscopic realism, evident in the miniaturist intensity of its perceptions. Late Freud is no less rigorously observant, but the means have changed anatomical structure is suggested in more fluid, rounding brushstrokes, which translate the realities of flesh into an altogether different painterly language.

The show opens with a series of paintings of Freud's first wife, Kitty Garman, that leave you in awe of the painter's devotion to detail. In one of these hypnotic portraits she clutches a rose and stares out, stage right, in rapt concentration. Every strand of hair gets its own brushstroke. Stepping closer and staring into her outsized, liquid eyes, you can even pick out the details of what they hold in reflection: a sash-window is mirrored in each dark pupil, and moving closer still you can make out the cityscape that it frames, outlined against the sky.

Another early masterpiece is Freud's 1952 portrait of Francis Bacon. Again, the subject looks away (Freud's sitters, possessed with their own privacy, rarely privilege you with a full frontal stare), He is presented as a curio, an object to marvel at: that extraordinary pear-shaped head, with its mumpishly enlarged cheeks; that stray, serpentine forelock. Staring so intensely, at things and people alike the young man and threateningly spiky indoor palm, in his 1951 Interior in Paddington, seem supended in amber early Freud discovers a kind of alienness in everything.

Freud has frequently stated his contempt for ex-pressionism in art but for all that, his own is powerfully, emotionally expressive, charged with the psychic peculiarities of an individual. If his art has a guiding theme, it is vulnerability. This is suggested, partly, by the alienated poses and expressions of his sitters (all of whom seem so utterly, utterly alone in their blank or sparsely furnished milieus); they frequently have the nervous expectancy of people anticipating the worst. It is also implicit, in early Freud, in the painter's own lucid, eyes-peeled attention to minutiae: there seems something latently paranoid about an art that feels its has to lavish such extraordinary attention on the least, most innocent object in its field of vision.

Freud, the grandson of Sigmund, has come in for more than his fair share of psychoanalytic interpretation but it is hard not to suspect that his early style owes more than a little to his childhood experiences as a Jew in the virulently antisemitic atmosphere of Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Freud's youthful realism has an over-attentive, hunted feel to it.

Freud's art inhabits a specific emotional territory, which Lawrence Gowing once memorably summed up as "the milieu of the unmade bed." It is the territory, too, of Walter Sickert, the first great British painter of unsentimentalised female nudity so it is appropriate that Freud's undoubted masterpieces, despite his frequent forays into other areas of portaiture (and even, occasionally, cityscape and still life) should be his female nudes. They get a room to themselves at the Hayward. It is placed at the heart of the show, and rightly; these are great paintings.

On superficial inspection, they are also quintessentially nasty paintings it is harder to imnagine anything further from the cosmetically cleaned-up ideal of womanhood touted by advertising and most women's magazines. Breasts are rarely pert, self-sustaining, in these pictures; they droop and sag, veinously overabundant, from bodies marked by the dimples and creases and stretchmarks of time. Pubic hair is disobedient to bikini-line convention. Vaginas are unconceled there is no sense, in Freud, of genteel propriety. These bodies are rendered with a mature, open-eyed awareness of physical realities modern vanitas paintings, Freud's nudes are ripe with mortality.

The bourgeois liberal knee-jerk response to these pictures might result in the view that they are the work of a closet sadist, misogynistically revelling in the indignities of a genitally exposed, splay-legged womankind. Certainly, Freud makes no concessions to the prime clich of expressionist portraiture no souls are bared in these paintings, just bodies. As if to underline her objecthood, Freud has painted one heavily pregnant woman on a tatty old sofa which messily spills its stuffing mutely predicting the woman's delivery of her own burden. Another's droopy breasts are rhymed in the hard-boiled egg, halved on a plate, that lurks in the painting's foreground.

Bodies are things, in Freud's art, but they are also symbols. Focussing so exclusively on physical realities, Freud reminds us of our solitary rootedness in the body, and of our vulnerability to death the one common denominator of human existence, and a solitary experience.

If vulnerability is the keynote of Freud's art, it should not be surprising that he has hit on the female nude as his great vehicle of selfexpression. The female anatomy is, by definition and tradition, more open than the male to conjure the same sense of vulnerability in his male nudes Freud resorts to props, like the live rodent held so disconcertingly close to his penis by the Naked Man with Rat. In his recent self-portraits, Freud makes the flesh on his face seem strangely raw and sheened genital-red. His female nudes are his greatest paintings not because they are masterpieces of "realism" (although they are, masterfully, alive to the tiniest differences in the forms of those who sit to him), still less because they embody a kind of fine art sadism. Painted with immense, wise sympathy, they embody his vision of humanity. Operating as analogies for his glum, lonely sense of himself and others, they are self-revelatory. They are, in a sense, self-portraits.