Lucian Freud: The Painter's Etchings

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Despite a well-received first solo exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944, it was only in the 1950s that a fascination with the human flesh began to dominate Freud's work, marking the beginning of his widespread success. Hoban, Phoebe (2014). Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p.29. ISBN 978-0-544-11459-3. Lit: Roger Bevan, ‘Freud's Latest Etchings’, Print Quarterly, vol.3, Dec. 1986, pp.334–43; Robert Flynn Johnson, ‘The Later Works 1961–1987’ in Lucian Freud: Works on Paper, exh. cat., South Bank Centre 1988, p.20–1; Jane Norrie, ‘Lucian Freud: Works on Paper’, Arts Review, vol.40, 3 June 1988, p.391; Craig Hartley, ‘Freud as an Etcher’ in Lucian Freud: The Complete Etchings 1946–1991, exh. cat., Thomas Gibson Fine Art Ltd 1991, [p.7]; Craig Hartley, Lucian Freud: Acqueforti, exh. cat., Galleria Arialdo Ceribelli, Bergamo 1994, p.17, repr. p.75

In 1996, the Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal mounted a major exhibition of 27 paintings and thirteen etchings, covering Freud's output to date. The following year the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art presented "Lucian Freud: Early Works". The exhibition comprised around 30 drawings and paintings done between 1940 and 1945. [35] In 1997 Freud received the Rubens Prize of the city of Siegen. [36] From September 2000 to March 2001, the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt was able to show 50 paintings, drawings and etchings from the late 1940s to 2000 in a larger overview exhibition despite the artist's considerable resentment towards Germany. [37] All print media bore the motif of Freud's outstanding painting Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1995-1996) depicting the nude Sue Tilley. [38] In addition to some of his most important nude portraits of women, the large-format picture Nude with leg up (Leigh Bowery) from 1992 was also shown in Frankfurt, which was removed in the Metropolitan Museum New York from the exhibition in 1993. [39] The Frankfurt exhibition was realised in a personal dialogue between curator Rolf Lauter and Lucian Freud and is thus the only project Freud authorised in direct cooperation with a German museum. [40] The major retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery in 1988 was the focal point for the BBC Omnibus programme which saw one of the very few conversations with Freud ever recorded, in this case with Omnibus director Jake Auerbach. [41] The conversations with the artist were made possible by Duncan MacGuigan from Acquavella Galleries New York. This was followed by a large retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002. In 2001, Freud completed a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. There was criticism of the portrayal in some sections of the British media. [42] In 2005, a retrospective of Freud's work was held at the Museo Correr in Venice scheduled to coincide with the Biennale. In late 2007, a collection of etchings went on display at the Museum of Modern Art. [43] Grave of Lucian Freud at Highgate Cemetery Blond Girl’ and ‘Man Posing’ [ P77182] belong to a group of six etchings which Freud made in 1984–5. The other prints which Freud made at this time are: ‘Ib’, ‘Thistle’, ‘Girl Holding Her Foot’ and ‘Bruce Bernard’. With the exception of ‘Ib’, which was made in 1984, all these prints are dated 1985.The relaxed intimacy captured in this etching is characteristic of Freud’s tendency to avoid dictating the poses of his sitters. As the artist has explained: ‘I am only interested in painting the actual person; in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong’ (quoted in Hughes 2000, p.20). For Freud, it was vital to paint and draw only people he knew well and he therefore regarded all images to be about himself, claiming that ‘my work is purely autobiographical. It is about myself and my surroundings’ (quoted in Feaver 2002, p.35). Lucian Freud was a British artist, famous for his portraits and self-portraits painted in an expressive neo-figurative style. He was born in Berlin, the grandson of the revolutionary psychologist Sigmund Freud, and the son of an architect Ernst Freud and an art historian Lucie Brasch.

Freud, who had been an avid gambler, often claimed he enjoyed making etchings because the process of transforming the design he created on a copper plate into a print on paper involved so many elements of chance—or what he called "mystery." He had exacting standards for his etchings and, if he was not satisfied with a section, he would wipe out the area and begin again—a process that involved additional sessions with the subjects—or even abandon the print entirely. Yet he embraced unintentional marks transferred from the plate to the print and the multiple lines that reveal modifications made to the figure and the composition, perhaps seeing such marks as evidence of imperfections inherent in all creations. Feaver, William. "Freud, Lucian Michael (1922–2011)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (onlineed.). Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/103935. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.) Starr Figura, Lucian Freud: The Painter’s Etchings, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, New York 2007, pp.30, 137, print from the main edition of forty-six reproduced cat.78, pl.108. Because of his deep interest in portraiture, it is perhaps not surprising that Freud would be drawn to Egyptian sculpture made during the reign of Akhenaten, who decreed that the visual arts move toward naturalism and away from hieratic representation. The Egyptian Book shows photographs published in J. H. Breasted's 1936 Geschichte Aegyptens of two sculpted heads discovered in the workshop of Thutmose, the pharaoh's chief sculptor, during an excavation of El-Amarna in the early twentieth century. Freud was one of a number of figurative artists who were later characterised by artist R. B. Kitaj as a group named the "School of London". [11] [12] This group was a loose collection of individual artists who knew each other, some intimately, and were working in London at the same time in the figurative style. The group was active contemporaneously with the boom years of abstract painting and in contrast to abstract expressionism. Major figures in the group included Freud, Kitaj, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, Leon Kossoff, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde, and Reginald Gray. Freud was a visiting tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art of University College London from 1949 to 1954.This first volume of the Lucian Freud catalogue raisonné focuses on the artist’s prints. The only complete volume of Freud’s prints, the book builds upon the work of earlier cataloguers and adds much new material which has come to light since the artist’s death. The volume records every print Freud made, from the early linocuts of the 1930s to his last etching published in 2007. Each work—including uneditioned etchings and unique proofs—is reproduced and fully catalogued by Toby Treves. Treves’s remarks include clear, precise technical detail for specialists and are informed by his knowledge of the wider oeuvre. An essay by the critic and Freud specialist Sebastian Smee, and an interview between art historian Martin Gayford and Freud’s main printmaker, Marc Balakjian, provide further insights into this part of the artist’s oeuvre. The catalogue raisonné has been designed by Design Holborn, also responsible for the recent publications Lucian Freud, with text by Martin Gayford, and Lucian Freud: A Life. UBS Art Collection: A-Z". Archived from the original on 26 August 2014 . Retrieved 19 November 2016.