The Benefit Worker

I heard the other day that the painting of the Benefit Worker by Lucien Freud is expected to reach 17 million (something) at auction. There was interview with the famous model for this painting. The interviewers on the BBC were saying how much more attractive the real woman was from the model. "You are prettier than the painting". Can we not escape this trite observation? Who cares? The painting is magnificent. She is beautiful in the painting. But, maybe, as Marcel Duchamp once said, she has a beauty that is devoid of the notion of beauty. I feel that we are so bound by conventional notions of beauty that we don`t look any more. The plastic faces of CNN, the plastic people who are striving for beauty are missing something. The Benefit Worker in the painting is as beautiful as the rolling hills of the Dales, the cragginess of a mountain side. What she is not is an airbrushed vacuum.