"Lucian Freud Drawings" at Acquavella Galleries According to many critics, Lucian Freud started making great paintings only after he let go of drawing: abandoning flat, crisply outlined figures for massively fleshy nudes nourished by a full brush. The quietly ravishing "Lucian Freud Drawings," at Acquavella Galleries, gives Freud's works on paper a chance to speak for themselves, beginning with his childhood sketches and ending with the last etching plate he touched. What they tell us is that Freud (1922-2011) kept on drawing, and that, to the last, energy still flowed between his paintings and his works on paper. The exhibition comes to Acquavella from Blain/Southern in London, where it accompanied a Freud retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery. It has been organized by William Feaver, the curator of Freud's retrospectives at Tate Britain (2002) and the Museo Correr in Venice (2005), who consulted closely with the artist until his death at 88 last July. It includes some small oil portraits and powerful examples of Freud's work in etching (which isn't exactly drawing but is close enough to deserve our scrutiny here, some five years after the Museum of Modern Art's "Lucian Freud: The Painter's Etchings" established his mastery of the medium.) "Lucian Freud Drawings" starts early, perhaps a little too early. The oldest work, "Birds in Tree," dates from about 1930 and was, as Mr. Feaver notes, exhibited in a 1938 show of "child art" at Peggy Guggenheim's London gallery. More revealing than this precocious scribble of conté crayon, however, are bristly pen drawings from around 1940: twinned figures ("Two Boys Lying Down") and family members ("The Painter's Mother"). Here too are comparatively tender animal studies: dead birds and monkeys, living horses. As is often remarked, Freud's portraits of the mid-1940s bear some resemblance to Neue Sachlichkeit works by George Grosz, Otto Dix and Christian Schad. Witness the icy, blue-eyed stare of "Boy on a Sofa," or the spiky hair and aloof mien of "La Voisine (The Neighbour)." But other influences, notably Picasso and Ingres, can be discerned in "Boy in a Red and Blue Jacket" and in a marvelous pair of studies of Francis Bacon strutting around with an open shirt and trouser fly, from 1951. It was Bacon who transformed Freud's painting, persuading him to experiment with thick hog-bristle brushes. He seems to have had an equally radical impact on Freud's drawing; in these studies it's as if Bacon's swashbuckling, sexually aggressive presence forced Freud to loosen up a little. We are a long way from the tightly wound "Man at Night: Self-Portrait" of 1947-8, with its tedious stippling. At this point the show leaps ahead to the 1970s and "80s, skipping a decade or so during which Freud focused almost entirely on painting. When he returned to drawing, it was, as Mr. Feaver writes, "both in the paintings and a reaction or counterpoint to them." Soft strokes of charcoal lay the groundwork for small, probing oil portraits. Or drawings emerge from finished paintings: Turner's "Sun Rising Through Vapour," or Freud's own "Large Interior WII (After Watteau)." The results can be awfully poignant, as when a small painting of Freud's depressive mother from 1972 is paired with a drawing of her from 1983. The signs of aging, already apparent in the painting, have been accentuated in the drawing, which faithfully records its subject's thinning hair and drooping head. At the same time, the shift from painting to the more intimate medium of drawing restores a modicum of dignity. The end of the show finds Freud fully absorbed in etching and transferring some of its lessons to his drawings. The deep contours and webbed patches of a well-known 1993 etching of the bulging cranium of Leigh Bowery, for instance, find their way into quick sketches of heads (Isaiah Berlin, John Richardson, Balthus). You can tell that Freud found etching more exciting than drawing on paper. The uncertainty of the printing process appealed to him; as he said, "You can't tell how it will be." We'll never know how his last plate, "Head of Jeremy King," might have turned out, though it looks promising: a long, craggy face that seems to sit right on the knot of a stiff necktie. But drawing, he knew, had its own risks of failure. As he told the writer Martin Gayford in 2010: "Being able to draw well is the hardest thing - far harder than painting, as one can easily see from the fact that there are so few great draftsmen compared to the number of great painters - Ingres, Degas, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, just a few." "Lucian Freud Drawings" continues through June 9 at Acquavella Galleries, 18 East 79th Street, Manhattan; (212) 734-6300, acquavellagalleries.com.