Lucian Freud.

The international acclaim recently accorded Lucian Freud's painting is a fascinating phenomenon. Freud is part of no movement or school; he has no influential followers (though several second-rate imitators); he is a private man, not given to mainstream interviews, profiles, or screen appearances. He abstemiously confines his work to portraits of clothed and naked people, mostly family and friends who pose in his London studio. Admiration for his fulsome handling of paint comes in the same breath as shudders of repulsion at his unshrinking portrayal of human flesh. Most of his devotees appear to find his seemingly straightforward brand of figurative realism a haven from the wilder shores of contemporary art and will assimilate, even deftly defend, his detractors' accusations of misanthropy and provinciality. He is used as a stick to beat the arcane, the unskillful, the victims of the new.

Freud was never a revolutionary. His potent early work wove German Neue Sachlichkeit inheritance, contemporary English influence, and sheer waywardness to achieve a sophisticated innocence not uncommon in British painting. The big push occurred with Freud's increasing dissatisfaction with the cool linearity of his early style in which oil was used like watercolor, a technique that precluded painterly ambition. A robust, meatier manner ensued and the female nude gained ascendance. Thereafter his entrenched position as a figure painter was likened to and distinguished from that of Francis Bacon, their dialogue providing prescriptive ammunition in the old abstracton versus figuration debate. Bacon made the bigger splash internationally; Freud stealthily built up a formidable case against the cosmetic pyrotechnics of his (then) boon companion.

Bruce Bernard, who has known and written about both painters, is the latest of Freud's hagiographers. His text is brief, prefacing 290 color plates that, presumably, are the main point of this book. They seem carefully reproduced and contain some unfamiliar early works. Bernard's essay is one of those exercises in enthusiasm, personal but untrespassing interpretation, and basic art history that raises more questions than it answers. It dwells on a handful of works across Freud's fifty-year career but has none of the sustained exegesis of Lawrence Gowing's lengthier but equally eulogistic volume of 1982.

Let there be no mistake: Bernard reveres Freud. He is "one of the greatest portrayers of the individual human being in European Art - and therefore in the whole of painting." His recent works of his model "Big Sue" are among "the most extraordinary nudes ever painted." An etching of her is "as powerful" as Picasso's Weeping Woman; only Vermeer and El Greco can compare with Freud's Wasteground. His Naked Man on a Bed is "the most unalluring and brutally prosaic representation of the body in Realist painting." Not even Ingres, Manet, or Degas have "examined and rendered clothes with such dispassionate concentration." So it goes on. Freud is "magnetic," "magical," "incomparable" - in short, in case you haven't guessed, "a genius." Whether or not you concur with this view is beside the point. Because Freud's work embodies a concentrated gaze, it must ipso facto be superior to other kinds of effort: clinging to its very paint is a fibrous moral static that puts it beyond the reach of analysis. Greatness is equated with hard work and persistence, and Freud deserves his preeminence because he has brought "new information and fresh human feeling" to art. These elements may be important but, once taken on board, they are the first to lose their efficacy.

As for the rest, we glean a certain amount of biographical information, and are treated to some snapshots of Freud's models, such as Harry Diamond and Leigh Bowery. There are passages on his attraction to gay male models and mentors ("these are deep waters that cannot be plumbed with any certainty") and almost nothing on his attraction to several compelling women. His taste in art is perfunctorily treated. When we are told that Freud greatly admires a particular Bellini or Rogier van der Weyden's Deposition, surely we deserve more searching comment. Like Gowing, Bernard seems to regard Freud as an autogenic wunderkind. Yet Freud is one of the great lookers at the art of the past. The way it has seeped into every crevice of his painting is, after all, part of its appeal to his more disaffected admirers.

Richard Shone is an associate editor of The Burlington Magazine.