Thirty years ago the most influential art collector in Britain, charles satchiI don’t hesitate to think Lucian Freud What “The greatest realist painter since Ingres”, in the Vanity Fair article. “Someone sees the Prado or the Louvre or National Gallery I’m sure Freud’s works will hang there 200 years from now.” Fortunately, it wasn’t necessary to wait so long. More than fifty works These days, these works of Freud occupy the same rooms where Titian and Raphael stayed until recently.
The Trafalgar Square Museum celebrates the centennial of the birth of Freud (1922-2011), considered the most influential figure in British figurative art of the 20th century, with a spectacular retrospective. Jewish born in Germany, Freud came to England as a child in 1933, fleeing the Nazis. The son of an architect who wanted to be an artist and Sigmund Freud The painter, who had a complex personality and a sulphurous life outside of domestic rules, would admit that he had advanced over the years, had not tried his grandfather’s recipe and had psychoanalysis done.
The exhibition brings together some of his best-known paintings, mixing them with others hardly seen for a long time. organizers header, “New insights”, Trying to escape the myth that sometimes overshadows the work of the sexual adventurer with an insatiable appetite and is the protagonist of countless illegitimate children, parties and fights. Francis Bacon In the 1950s he was addicted to gambling in the lumpen joints of Soho, casinos, as well as the aristocracy and the underworld.
Freud’s paintings, despite the wishes of the curators, still basically biographical and they speak for themselves. The models he has used for over 70 years have mostly belonged to his closest family and social circle, be it his daughters, lovers, officials, rulers or dogs, and not to forget his numerous self-portraits. In one of the last “Painter’s Work” (1993), Freud appears in a completely naked, empty space, his flesh dying, especially when painting in his workshop, from which he has scarcely left in recent years, fixing his gaze on the invisible canvas that occupies him. This a brutal, uncompromising portraithow you treat corpses.
Nudes, invariable in Freud’s work, rude, sometimes brutal. Inside Nude Portrait (1979-80) an unidentified woman who appears to be asleep reveals her gender, swollen breasts, abdomen with a new birth stitch. The artist’s gaze is that of a scalpel, a coroner’s eye with an instinctiveness devoid of empathy, shocking, sharp “I am interested in the animal side of people. That’s where some of my taste in nude portrait comes from”, had known. Freud portrayed his young lover, Bernadine Coverley, pregnant with their first child. Beautiful, today’s famous designer. Bella poses nude in one of the exhibits. In another, dressed, lying on the couch, she does it with her sister Esther. “He’s a master of intimacy,” says Daniel F. Hermann, the show’s curator.
Freud portrayed powerful people like the banker. Jacob Rotchschild or the baron Hans Henrik Thyssen-BornemiszaThe exhibition will go to his museum in Madrid from February 14. Elizabeth II also posed for him. It is said that between the brushstrokes they spoke of horses, of a mutual passion. The result is a small oil painting of which the monarch is probably not very happy, in worse condition than the dogs and quadrupeds that Freud painted.