Their correspondence is remarkable not just for the intimacy it reveals, but for the fact that the volume exists at all: while Freud was alive, none of these letters would have seen the light of day. He was obsessively, obstreperously concerned with his privacy. One biography was halted after Freud felt too disconcerted by its revelations, and another was stopped at Freud’s behest by the very persuasive presence of a group of East-End gangsters. The first volume of William Feaver’s weighty account was only published in 2019 — eight years after the artist’s death.

Martin Gayford — who edited the new volume with Freud’s long-term assistant David Dawson — was uncompromising about how Freud would see this latest book: “I’m sure he wouldn’t have welcomed it… [but] posterity is owed the correspondence.”

It’s not hard to see why an intrepid writer would run the risk of Freud’s wrath or even hired violence. Freud’s life is made for a biography. The grandson of Sigmund Freud, he was born in Berlin and moved to London to escape the rise of Nazism in 1933. He dated Greta Garbo, danced with Marlene Dietrich, was friends with Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon, married the sculptor Jacob Epstein’s daughter, Kitty (after an affair with her aunt), eloped with the Guinness heiress and socialite Lady Caroline Blackwood, and, in his later years, was friends with the supermodel (and future subject) Kate Moss. He dated the artist Celia Paul — after having met her when she was his student — and had scores of other mistresses. He is the acknowledged father to 14 children, and the suspected father to dozens more.

It is this celebrity — his “fame and infamy” — that the new retrospective at the National Gallery, Lucian Freud: New Perspectives, hopes to “look beyond”. The exhibition’s curator, Daniel F. Herrmann, writes that Freud’s artistic practice has been “overshadowed by biography”, and he hopes to bring the paintings back to the fore.

It’s a worthy aim — who doesn’t want an art exhibition to be focused on the art? — but, when it comes to Freud, the line between biography and creation has always been rather fraught. After his early portrait of his art teacher and friend Cedric Morris (Love Lucian also features letters to Morris), Freud rarely painted portraits of named sitters. His pictures of his first wife, Kitty Garman, often refer to her only as “girl”: Girl with a Kitten (1947); Girl with a White Dog (1951 – 1952); Girl with Roses (1948). Garman may have been Freud’s muse, but he was meticulous about keeping her name, and any hint of their joint biography, out of his work.

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This anonymising impulse continues throughout Freud’s work: his first portrait of a male nude is called Naked Man with Rat (1977-8). There is no mention of the man, Raymond Jones, who took off his clothes and sat for hours and hours at a time with a drugged rat next to his naked testicles. (To keep the rat still during the painting, Freud fed it champagne mixed with sleeping pills. As if the scene couldn’t get any more surreal, Raymond recalled how Freud used to stop painting to have sex with his girlfriend in the bathroom next door, and would come back having had a “bath to settle [him]self down”.)

Even the nobility — Freud liked to claim he moved “vertically” through society from wheelers and dealers to the Royal Family — did not avoid his anti-biographical impulse. In her 1957 portrait, the 11th Duchess of Devonshire, Deborah, is only given the name Woman in a White Shirt.

But it is not just his painting’s anonymising titles that seem to simultaneously invite and deny discussions of biography and celebrity. Freud’s characteristic style is also marked by an almost clinical detachment. His sitters are subjected to his excoriating gaze, and the final products seem to treat them more as observed animals or inert carcases than humans.

Take his 1995 work Benefits Supervisor Sleeping. It is a brilliant painting of “Big Sue” Tilley on a cream and floral sofa, with the heft and weight of her body falling naturally towards the painting’s bottom edge. Her flesh is uncompromisingly, brilliantly realised — Freud was a master of tone, and it is possible to see the tangible difference between the soft squish of her stomach and the knobble of her knee. Yet for all this brilliance, the painting is unbelievably disconcerting. It is notionally a painting of “Big Sue” asleep, but the cold, unsparing nature of Freud’s gaze makes her seem dead. Is there a chance this is a corpse? If her left arm weren’t raised and holding on to the back of the sofa, it would be all too easy to think so.

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It is, of course, the other aspects of Freud’s life — the model-firing; the bread-roll-throwing; the general stroppiness — that the curators of the new exhibition want to “move beyond”. And they have a good point: once you hear of some of Freud’s behaviour, it’s hard to look at his work in the same light. Look at his “naked portrait” — Freud hated the word “nude” — of his 18-year-old daughter Rose Boyt, Portrait of Rose (1979). It’s an unashamedly sexual picture: Rose is lying back on a sofa, with her arms raised and her legs apart. Even MailOnline insists upon pixelating the area between Rose’s legs. The picture has caused a stir ever since it was first exhibited, but, after reading how he once shouted across a restaurant that “women should smell of one thing: cunt — in fact, they should invent a perfume called cunt”, it’s even harder to brush off an all-pervasive sense of his chauvinism.

This anecdote was just one drunken outburst — and it is unlikely Freud ever imagined it being used in criticism of his work. But it is part and parcel of a picture of a man who could be uncompromisingly cruel, just as much as he could be ostentatiously generous. In his biography of the artist Breakfast with Lucian, Geordie Greig draws attention to this uglier side of Freud’s character: he could be anti-Semitic, despite being Jewish himself; he railed against waiters for assuming he was gay when he was out with another male friend, despite having had homosexual affairs; and he was continually getting into altercations in bars and restaurants, even when he was elderly.

But however scandalous these stories are, they only really lead us back to one, boringly hackneyed, question: how far can you separate the art from the artist? It’s almost a moot point. You can feel Freud’s cruel, uncompromising, brilliant gaze in every canvas — and the paintings do not get worse, or better, when you hear sweet stories of him drawing pictures for children, or being unbelievably unpleasant to his mistresses.

There is one person for whom there was little difference between Freud the artist, and Freud the man. The artist Celia Paul was Freud’s student, and had a relationship with him for a decade. Paul sat for many of Freud’s paintings and has written, beautifully and eloquently, about the pain of being his “muse” (she hates that word) in her two books Self Portrait (2019) and Letters to Gwen John (2022).

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Paul has recently painted a work called Overshadowed — a large portrait which is on show at an exhibition in Victoria Miro until 1 October. She has painted herself seated, staring out at the viewer with her hands clasped. But when I speak to her, she draws attention to the fact that it isn’t a simple self-portrait: “I have painted myself as a painter.” The work is a response to the Renaissance artist’s Sofonisba Anguissola’s Self-Portrait with Bernadino Campi (1559), in which all power balances are upended: Anguissola is being painted by her teacher, but she appears to be in charge. In Paul’s words, she “guides Campi’s hand as he appears to paint her”.

Paul wanted to do her own version of Anguissola’s painting — “Campi was Anguissola’s teacher as Freud had been my teacher and lover” — and “placed Lucian on the left of the composition”, using his self-portrait as a guide. But the result was “too illustrative“, and Paul rubbed him out. All that is left is his ghostly shadow. The resulting work is quietly, inordinately powerful. It is about looking, concentration, and focus; and it’s also a reversal of the expected power dynamic. Paul is seated, smaller than Freud’s shadow, but her gaze leaves no ambiguity about who is in control.

This is a work which plays with the shadow of biography — letting it hover; fade; and be present despite its absence. It is, wonderfully, the antithesis of many of the impulses in Freud’s work. Perhaps better than any exhibition, it succeeds in trying to “move beyond” biography; the unseemly, ungainly elements of Freud’s life. Here, in Paul’s painting, is proof of the power of letting them linger, overshadowed by her own talent.

The robot is working at the behest of the Oxford-based research group, The Institute of Digital Archaeology — the team that, in 2016, created a 20-foot-tall replica of Syria’s Arch of Triumph, after it was destroyed by Isis terrorism in the ancient city of Palmyra. Last year, they took the reconstructive powers of technology one step further when they brought John Keats back to life, just in time for the bicentenary of his death. The necromancy was made complete by a reconstruction of Keats’s distinctive “cockney” voice — which you can hear in a CGI reading of his poem “Bright Star”.

However disconcerting this CGI-Keats might be, the Institute of Digital Archaeology’s most recent project has rather higher stakes. By copying the marbles, the Institute’s director, Roger Michel, hopes to create replicas which are “visually indistinguishable” from the sculptures and frieze housed in the British Museum. The team has even managed to source Pentelic marble — the same stone used by the Greeks back in the 5th century BC — to make these sculptures “exact duplicates”.

Michel’s intentions for these copies are not unambitious. After creating two prototypes, he wants to recreate the marbles Lord Elgin took from Greece in their entirety. These replicas will, in the Institute’s ideal world, replace the marbles in the British Museum so that the originals can be repatriated to the Acropolis Museum in Athens.

The idea has gained traction rapidly. The Times ran an editorial in favour of the swap, while The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins dismissed the views of “snooty art critics” who would damn the replicas as “fakes”. As for the Greeks, they have, understandably, latched onto it as a solution which could see the British Museum returning the marbles with as little fuss as possible.

But as with all things to do with the Parthenon Marbles, this is unlikely to be as simple as it might appear. Ignoring the fact that the British Museum’s position is still very much anti-repatriation — and, indeed, anti-reproduction: Michel had to resort to “guerrilla tactics” in order to scan the marbles for the 3D machining device, after the museum denied his request — there are difficulties in the nature of the replicas themselves: they could turn out to be better than those currently on display.

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Back in 1938 — under the direction of the conman, forger, and art dealer Joseph Duveen — the marbles were scoured with metal tools and dipped in acid. The marble’s colour — a beige-brown patina, with traces of the original paint which had adorned them back in antiquity — was replaced by a blank, uniform white. But with the replicas, there is no need to replicate this extraordinary damage. If the swap went ahead, the British Museum’s replica marbles could be more intact than the ones they were responsible for damaging.

So why is the museum still so reluctant to consider repatriation? The most obvious answer is the inevitable political disagreement that will follow. But there’s something else at stake too. Beneath all the symbolism, op-eds, and campaigns, the Parthenon Marbles are works of art. And in the art world, copies, fakes, and replicas occupy a precariously odd position.

More than two and a half millennia after Phidias was carving the original Parthenon Marbles, and half a century before a robot would be making the copies, the American artist Sturtevant came up against this difficulty. Sturtevant — the professional name of the artist born Elaine Frances Horan — is now famed as the “mother of appropriation art” (an Eighties movement which prized using the work of others to create new, altered, art). But for more than a decade in the middle of her career, after facing a deluge of criticism, she was forced to retire from the art world.

Looking at Sturtevant’s work now, it is easy to understand why she may not have been a favourite in the art scene. Side by side, her version of Andy Warhol’s “Flowers” (imaginatively titled “Warhol’s Flowers”) is almost indistinguishable from the original. Her “repetitions” took the works of other Pop Art masters, and copied them with only the most subtle of changes.

Warhol, for what it’s worth, approved of her work — but other artists were not so accommodating. Upon seeing her version of his installation “The Store”, Claes Oldenburg never spoke to Sturtevant again. And after her 1973 show at Everson Museum of Art was met with the most lacklustre of responses, Sturtevant retired from the art world until the 1980s.

Here in Britain, a rather different figure inspired a similar debate. John Myatt is an artist and convicted forger, who spent four months in prison for his role in painting works which were sold as original artworks by painters ranging from Marc Chagall to Ben Nicholson. Myatt’s forgeries were so good that they were able to fool major auction houses including Christie’s and Sotheby’s; police estimates suggest that around 140 paintings are still in circulation. Now out of prison, Myatt continues to paint “genuine fakes” — and collectors can buy them as an affordable alternative to the real deal. Given they are visually indistinguishable from the originals, even to the most trained expert eyes, why are they valued so much less? The answer is something everyone knows instinctively: there is a romance, a delight, and an excitement to owning a piece of art by a famous painter that is not matched by a print or forgery, no matter how good it is.

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Will the reproductions of the Parthenon Marbles face this problem? It could be argued that, rather than being forgeries in the John Myatt school, they are “repetitions” more akin to the work of Sturtevant. Myatt painted solely for financial gain, while both Sturtevant and the Parthenon project have conceptual, intellectual ramifications.

And what if these brilliantly accurate marbles are a different form of duplication entirely? They are not human forgeries, nor man-made experiments with the nature of repetition. The science of digital conservation and archaeology has gone beyond preservation — repairing damage; analysing paint-types and materials; and safeguarding against future harm — to also encompass creation. These works of art are, fundamentally, a work of technology, and they herald a brave new world for the possibilities of conservation and curation in museums.

Back in 2017, Gainsborough’s painting “The Morning Walk” was attacked by a screwdriver; in Amsterdam, Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” has been knifed twice and sprayed with acid once. “The Mona Lisa” has suffered every indignity possible: rocks, teacups, cakes, and red paint have all been thrown on it. With the possibilities of digital reproduction, could we reach a point where beloved works of art are kept safely in vaults and only exact replicas sit on the walls of galleries?

There have already been entirely virtual exhibitions, including this Spring’s “Virtual Veronese” at the National Gallery. Visitors had the chance to see Paolo Veronese’s “The Consecration of Saint Nicholas” — an altarpiece in an Italian church — without ever leaving central London.

As technology improves, and the capacities of machines become ever more human, there is a chance that we begin to see more and more of these “perfect” reproductions of artworks — created long after the artist whose hand originally made them has died. This has already started to happen. Back in 2015, the Van Gogh Museum launched the “Relievo Collection”: exact replicas of the artist’s works (even complete with reproductions of the back of the canvases) for institutions and collectors to purchase. Walter Benjamin’s famous comments about the “aura” of art “wither[ing] in the age of mechanical production” seem all too prescient.

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When I spoke to Michel, he argued that there is “a sharp distinction to be made between the marbles as art objects, and the marbles as beloved national treasures”. For him, this distinction is why the real marbles rather than the replicas should be returned to Greece. But as the science of preservation and conservation continues, perhaps we should also insist on a sharp distinction between works of art and marvels of technology. After all, it is the knowledge that a human hand carved the original Parthenon sculpture that makes them so emotive as both artworks and national treasures.

Yes, the opportunity to have these brilliant reproductions in their place is one not to be missed. But amid all these wonders of technology, let’s not forget that they’re not the real deal — any more than CGI Keats is the beloved poet brought back to life.

Their absence is perhaps understandable. In our age of mass-strikes, cost of living crises, and political turmoil, escapism — even of the murderous kind — seems like an appealing option.

This wasn’t the case in the 19th century, when everyone from Anthony Trollope and Elizabeth Gaskell to Benjamin Disraeli, turned their hand to writing novels which described “the way we live now”: itself the title of Trollope’s 1875 satire of financial scandals. Gaskell’s North and South (1855) is an emotionally febrile exploration of the horrors of industrial England, as the initially naïve and snobbish Margaret Hale is forced to leave the idyllic Helston — a village like “in one of Tennyson’s poems” — and move north. A few mill workers’ riots, some tasteless northern wallpaper and one naval mutiny later, Margaret is morally improved and, perhaps more importantly, engaged.

Disraeli’s novel, Sybil or The Two Nations (1845) is a similar exploration of “the Condition of England”. The poverty of those living in England’s industrial cities is so extreme as to seem to belong to another country. Many of Charles Dickens’s works contain an element of reportage on the same places. Amidst the unstintingly ridiculous character names, putrid fog, and marauding donkeys, Hard Times (1854), David Copperfield (1850), Oliver Twist (1839), and Bleak House (1853) all attempted to reflect Britain back at the British.

Middlemarch (1872), George Eliot’s “study of provincial life”, is the undisputed masterwork of this genre. Through granular examination of the lives of the inhabitants of a middle-England town, Eliot explores everything from medical developments to the status of women in the early 19^th century. But its regular appearance on lists of “the best state of the nation novels” leaves me queasy. Is the book intended to be about national change and the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, or is it a universal examination of human psychology?

State of the nation novels have been defined as those that “address social and political changes”. This seems simplistic, even trite: by its nature, a work of fiction inevitably addresses social questions. By that reckoning, Middlemarch is certainly a state of the nation novel, but then so is Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979). Eliot, like Adams, toys with “the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”. She gives us a tangled web of human interconnectedness, heartbreak, and failure. The number 42 is conspicuously absent.

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Yet some contemporary novelists have taken up the challenge. Amanda Craig has written a sequence of nine interconnected novels all set in contemporary Britain, including 2020’s The Golden Rule. For her, contemporary state of the nation novels are those which, like Middlemarch or any of Dickens’s or Trollope’s offerings, “help us get a grasp of the way we live now”. She acknowledges a scarceness of modern equivalents to the likes of Gaskell and Disraeli, and attributes it to being “bombarded with current affairs by the media”.

The author William Boyd similarly blames the news cycle. “The basic problem is, it seems to me, that time moves on so much more quickly than in the 19^th century”. There is a risk for novelists that a “on-the-nail, crucial novel will be irrelevant in three years time”. He uses the example of Justin Cartwright’s 1995 novel In Every Face I Meet. The “central epiphanic metaphor” is a try scored by the former England rugby union captain Will Carling. As Boyd says, “that novel will now require footnotes to make any sense to someone who doesn’t remember the occasion”.

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Looming obsolescence was less of an issue for Dickens and Trollope: their works were often serialised prior to publication, in magazines and newspapers which carried news as well as fiction. Rather than writing about the news cycle of politics and contemporary issues, they were practically a part of it.

Thackeray biographer, D. J. Taylor, identifies another issue that faces the would-be state of the nation writer: in the age Thackeray created Vanity Fair (1848), “it was possible for a writer to understand his or her society in a way that isn’t possible now”. They could grasp the political, financial, and class structure of society. Now, “no modern novelist really understands how money works”. It is far harder to describe class signifiers and differences in an age where someone earning a six-figure salary can still call themselves “culturally working class”.

And, many novelists are out of touch with the class-based issues which are at the heart of state of the nation fiction. There are, of course, exceptions — Luan Goldie’s brilliant new novel These Streets is about gentrification and the cost of living in East London; an area the author knows well. But it would be hard for a West London-dwelling, Remainer, Lib Dem-voting novelist to write convincingly about disillusionment and anti-EU sentiment in a former mining town.

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The lack of literary fiction that deals with contemporary life is not a recent development. Out of the books which met with acclaim last year, it would be hard to find many which take, as their primary subject matter, the intricacies and relentlessness of modern life.

But it would be facetious to claim there have been no blockbuster state of the nation novels in living memory. In 2012, John Lanchester published Capital: a precisely observed chronicle of London life as the 2008 financial crisis shook the world. The lives of the inhabitants of one road in London — from Polish builders to Senegalese footballers and rich Bankers — are fastidiously explored, and a true portrait of Britain in the 21st century emerges.

Most recently, Ali Smith wrote her Seasonal Quartet in the years following the Brexit referendum. Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer and this year’s Companion Piece offer a commentary on British lives as they are lived now. While 19th century novelists recorded railway timetables, the price of stamps, and contemporary legal battles, Smith instead revels in descriptions of disembodied heads and an almost ekphrastic dedication to describing art. Her books are about contemporary life — Summer managed to touch on Covid-19 despite only being published a few months after the pandemic began — but, in their radical form and style, they are not so much “state of the nation” novels as they are markers of the “state of literary fiction”.

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Neither Lanchester nor Smith’s achievements alter the fact that this is a genre where the tide is going out. What could be the cause of this reluctance to fictionalise the day-to-day lives of normal people?

For Boyd, there is a pragmatic reason: it is risky, and potentially unrewarding, for writers to write about the present. Many novelists — himself included — write about the recent or semi-distant past because “everything is fixed and known”. From The Blue Afternoon (1993) to The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth (2017), Boyd has written contemporary novels and short stories, but he would “defy any reader to determine what year they’re set in”. He takes “great pains not to make any topical reference so that its contemporary feel can last a decade or maybe two and is generic rather than precise”.

But Craig takes a different approach. The protagonist of her most recent novel, The Golden Rule, is a single mother who cleans homes for a living and continually struggles to make ends meet. But Craig believes that readers are put off by the potential Left-of-centre moralising of a novel which deals with poverty and financial inequality. A state of the nation novel “has to be able to hold a mirror up to some of the big social and personal problems of the day and ask readers what they sympathise with”, but “a strong moral compass hasn’t been fashionable for the past 75 years”.

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This difference in opinion marks a subtly different approach from the purpose of contemporary details in fiction. Are they intended to provide a “contemporary feel” — a modern backdrop to the story’s action — or are they a part of the story’s direction, and the reason for it having been written?

With Boyd’s fiction, the answer is clearly the former — and for Craig, as for her Victorian counterparts, the answer is the latter. But for Smith, the answer lies somewhere in the middle of the two: contemporary resonances give her stories momentum and purpose, but her Seasonal Quartet is less fiction that mirrors contemporary life than fiction which mentions contemporary life but retains an element of detachment from it.

This is why these novels have fallen out of fashion. For Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and Thackeray, literary culture was inextricably linked to everyday life: novels appeared, quite literally, next to news in the pages of periodicals — and often used events from current affairs as potential plot lines. In our day and age, authors, novelists, and the rarefied book world are separate from “normal life”. (Unsurprisingly publishing statistics reveal a dearth of working-class employees in the industry.) We don’t want to read novels about the housing crisis, corrupt politicians, and global turmoil when we can watch it on our television screens. In response, fiction has found a home for itself ever further from day-to-day reality.

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But we should not be content with this division of literary culture from everyday existence. Let’s bring back serialised novels in newspapers, books with thinly veiled real-life politicians, and fiction about the minutiae of normal life. It isn’t the issues or politics that readers remember about Victorian state of the nation novels, but the characters.

The Britain they lived in, with its financial scandals and venal celebrities, is not so different from ours. The stories are all still there: a modern day Becky Sharpe in a train strike; a scheming, corrupt Obadiah Slope in the contemporary Church of England; an updated Oliver Twist as a look at the woeful state of children in care; or even Dorothea Brooke as a certain feckless MP’s wife. All we are doing is waiting for talents to tell them.