SLate in his life, over a meal in a restaurant, Lucian Freud explained that there were two questions that did not interest him. Sigmund Freud’s grandson was the first to name psychoanalysis. The second question didn’t immediately occur to him, at least that’s what he pretended to do at the time. During the next course it came back to him: the one after Judaism. He must have meant this statement as teasing, since these were the two core questions of his biography. Lucian Freud was not quite seventeen when Sigmund Freud died in exile in London in September 1939. To the end, the painter, who died in 2011, fondly remembered his grandfather, who always seemed to be in a good mood and whose sense of humor he particularly appreciated. Sigmund Freud was lively and warm and had that quality of “really” intelligent people not to take everything seriously – as if they were so sure of their thing that they didn’t have to talk about it seriously.
However, Lucian Freud, who seemed to shy away from any form of introspection, not least because of his erratic lifestyle, claimed to have read little by his grandfather and never made a secret of his rejection of his method of treating mental problems. It says a lot about Lucian Freud’s perfidious sense of humor that one of his female models recounted how the painter enjoyed the idea of critics examining his paintings for Freudian influences. In a nude for which she modeled, she is lying semi-upright on a bed, like Manet’s Olympia. Her feet rest on a tattered pillow while cherries nestle against her buttocks. Freud announced to her that he wanted to pierce the pillow in such a way that feathers would be scattered in all directions. Then he burst out laughing at the thought of what his grandfather would have thought of the impaled pillow and the cherries.
Extremely complicated family relationships
Lucian Freud once confessed to reveling in the “anarchic thought” of coming “from nowhere.” It is therefore questionable whether it would have been in the interests of this dedicated loner to embed him back in the bosom of his family, as the London Freud Museum has now done with the exhibition “Lucian Freud – The Painter and His Family”. The institution in the stately villa where Sigmund Freud spent the last months of his life after fleeing Vienna and where his youngest daughter, the child analyst Anna Freud, lived until her death in 1982, traditionally organizes art exhibitions in the rooms, which are largely kept as they were during Freud’s lifetime .
However, Lucian Freud’s work has never been included, although there is some of his in the museum’s holdings, including the only known sculpture he made as a schoolboy and the early colored drawing of a potted palm tree depicting his “horrid Aunt Anna”. , as he called them, acquired at the artist’s first exhibition. Eleven years after his death, the museum is now taking the centenary coming up in December as an opportunity to take a brief look at the extremely complicated family relationships of Freud’s grandson, who was born in Berlin and who came into British exile with his parents at the age of ten.
Symbol of psychological excavation work
The exhibition marks the start of a series of events to mark the Lucian Freud anniversary, above all a major retrospective by London’s National Gallery (October 1 to January 22), which will then travel to the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. London’s Garden Museum is also devoting an exhibition (October 14 to March 5) to the artist with rarely or never before shown pictures of plants, which is intended to show how important these studies were for his work. Think not only of the gorgeous individual depictions of flowers, cacti, fruit, gnarled trees, or overgrown inner-city gardens, the nature of which Freud explored as meticulously as that of human flesh, but also the way in which he incorporated plant life into his portraits installed.
#Lucian #Freud #exhibition #front #damaged #cushions