Finding Freud in London: Five Lucian Freud exhibitions showing now
With this year marking the artist's centenary, we take a look at the best places to see works by Lucian Freud in the capital...
December 7, 2022
'A visit to the gallery is like going to the doctor,’ so said Lucian Freud. And fans of the artist certainly won’t suffer for lack of appointments or a long waiting list, with a number of London shows celebrating the centenary of the artist’s birth.
A landmark exhibition at the National Gallery, New Perspectives shows Freud at his grandest scale, an artistic giant with dimension-bending works. It’s expectedly conservative – glossing over, not engaging with, his ‘controversial life’ – but its limited captions do let his astonishing works speak for themselves.
-min.jpg)
But there’s even more to be gained by lingering over the details. His flesh is phenomenal, faces stippled with paint to the point of disgust. Non-finito (unfinished) works from his later career evidence his continued experimentation. Self-portraits speak to his own practice, and his tendency to clean his brushes against his studio walls.
-min.jpg)
Freud may have dissociated himself from Neue Sachlichkeit - the German New Objectivity movement - but we can’t help but recall Otto Dix in many of his society portraits. Their large, grasping hands are blunt displays of patriarchal power.
His painting of Celia Paul, by contrast, only superficially inverts the power dynamic. Though portrayed as an artist, we still see her through the man artist’s gaze. Her apron is covered in textured paint like his studio walls – herself, a canvas to be painted on, her body the place of disposal and cleaning of paint. (His other students, like Paula Rego, can also be found across the city.)
-min.jpg)
New Perspectives does engage with how the artist saw the purpose of art. For Freud, his practice was an experience, a way to spend time with people – including his dying mother, Lucie – but also to immortalise, to cheat death, and transcend flesh.
But there’s perhaps another purpose to Freud’s dynastic portraits. Here we see an artist conscious of cementing himself in high society, and the art history of North London. ‘Life is short, the Art long,’ he recalls – an idea which endures to the present, as merch made by the wealthy younger generations litters the gallery gift shop on exit.
Family is at the fore at the Freud Museum, the former Hampstead home of the painter’s grandfather Sigmund Freud, currently showing Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family. Most of Freud’s paintings were of his mother, herself an art historian. ‘I’m not in the picture,’ Lucie once remarked, in reference to her position in the family, and as an older woman in society. But here, she’s ‘in all of the pictures’, as the artist famously replied.
Unlike in New Perspectives, we see Lucie full of life. If Freud’s idea that all art is ‘purely biographical’ is to be believed, then here is the closest we can get to understanding the role that women played in his practice. (Small in size - and disappointingly, captions – there’s nevertheless a wealth to be found in the accompanying exhibition book.)
As her favourite child, Freud once said he felt ‘stifled’ by his mother. He was grateful for having a distant father, and thus parental balance. Having two supportive parents would have led him to rebel and become a jockey instead – the smallest of nods to his privilege.
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Zimmerlinde dominate the Freud family home; all reputed descendants of those first planted by Sigmund Freud in Vienna and brought with him in his flight from Nazi persecution to the UK in 1938. Cut, propagated, and shared, the plant has since become an ‘unofficial family emblem’ – and commodified as a gift to be purchased.
-min.JPG)
If Freud’s comfortable family home reflects his life of ‘middle-class luxury’, these roots and their social connections are the unintended subject of the unmissable Plant Portraits at the Garden Museum.
In Paris, 1946, Freud met with Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. In 1959, he painted cyclamen flowers in the 11th Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s Chatsworth bathroom.
Banana trees speak to his travels to - and detached gaze upon – Jamaica. His artworks are artefacts of his desire for ‘the primitive simplicity of a temporary exotic haven’ – painted from the residence of the James Bond author Ian Fleming in 1953.
-min.jpg)
The Garden Museum hints at connections between the botany of the empire, and Freud’s own practices of collection. Context comes in captions; the artist liked the Tuscan turf so much, he brought it back with him to London to complete his painting, ‘Landscape’ (1993).
The artist had always paid attention to detail in his surroundings, drawing Christmas cacti and the deep roots of plants from an early age. Plant Portraits mirrors such detail in its curation, carving space for fresh insights on Freud’s practice. Diversely curated with book illustrations, archive photographs, and a whole bathroom installed with the artist’s paint boxes – it is small and perfectly informed.
.jpg)
Freud drew much from the art teacher and plantsman Cedric Morris – who saw the ‘ruthlessness, strength, and lust’, not prettiness, of plants. He soon started depicting plant-human interactions, often using plants in place of people, creating intimate portraits and strikingly modern works.
With Friends and Relations, Gagosian lingers in the people of London, showing Freud amongst his friends and artistic influences. We see how four men – Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – none of whom were born in London, made the city their home, immortalising the glamorous Colony Club, the small and sordid windows of inner-city townhouses, and its famous people, through art.
Freud was the only one to collect from his contemporaries; Bacon painted twenty portraits of Freud in the 1960s, some of which feature, but it is more intriguing to see these friends curated in conversation, tracing the connections between works.
With Frank Auerbach, Freud shared an interest in the artist-model relationship, and a similar approach to texture and impasto. Still, Freud’s realistic nudes are more detached and voyeuristic. The only abstraction comes in the naked portraits of his adult daughter, Bella, her name and relationship to him absent in his titles, with Gagosian restoring her identity in subtle captions.
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Accompanying photographs by Bruce Bernard show Freud draped over Celia Paul, playing with the adult Bella, and standing on his head – more glimpses into the artist’s character, as well as the wider social scene. Though monochrome, they create a sense of fun, humour, mirroring their warm relationships; when Freud’s 1952 portrait of Francis Bacon was stolen from West Berlin’s Nationalgalerie in 1992, he responded by producing a wanted poster, also on show.
United by an ‘unshakeable belief in the value of figurative art in a time of abstraction,’ these four artists contributed to the wider post-humanist movement of the 1960s onwards, but it is their playfulness – and privilege - that we take away from this exhibition.
Interior Life at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert adds layers to our understanding of the young socialite portrayed at Gagosian. Focusing on his late printmaking from 1982, with accompanying photographs by David Dawson, we see his more mature practice – and lifelong continuities in his approach.
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert delves the deepest into Freud’s artistic process. Etchings nestle beside their original copper plates, along with drawings and watercolours. The artist’s mother and father are depicted in different media, representations of their different characters, as hinted at in his family home.
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Taken during the artist’s days of rest, and immediately after his death in 2011, David Dawson’s photographs also document Freud’s practice – and, through his practice, his personality. They offer lenses on the stories behind the National Gallery’s great works, using doors and walls as palettes, and source photographs of David Hockney sitting for his portrait.
So let the artist’s infamy endure – but let us look at it even more closely than before.
Lucian Freud: New Perspectives is on view at the National Gallery until 22 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family is on view at the Freud Museum until 29 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits is on view at the Garden Museum until 5 March 2023.
Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – and Bruce Bernard: Portraits of Friends - is on view at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill until 28 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Interior Life is on view at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert until 16 December 2022.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
'A visit to the gallery is like going to the doctor,’ so said Lucian Freud. And fans of the artist certainly won’t suffer for lack of appointments or a long waiting list, with a number of London shows celebrating the centenary of the artist’s birth.
A landmark exhibition at the National Gallery, New Perspectives shows Freud at his grandest scale, an artistic giant with dimension-bending works. It’s expectedly conservative – glossing over, not engaging with, his ‘controversial life’ – but its limited captions do let his astonishing works speak for themselves.
But there’s even more to be gained by lingering over the details. His flesh is phenomenal, faces stippled with paint to the point of disgust. Non-finito (unfinished) works from his later career evidence his continued experimentation. Self-portraits speak to his own practice, and his tendency to clean his brushes against his studio walls.
Freud may have dissociated himself from Neue Sachlichkeit - the German New Objectivity movement - but we can’t help but recall Otto Dix in many of his society portraits. Their large, grasping hands are blunt displays of patriarchal power.
His painting of Celia Paul, by contrast, only superficially inverts the power dynamic. Though portrayed as an artist, we still see her through the man artist’s gaze. Her apron is covered in textured paint like his studio walls – herself, a canvas to be painted on, her body the place of disposal and cleaning of paint. (His other students, like Paula Rego, can also be found across the city.)
New Perspectives does engage with how the artist saw the purpose of art. For Freud, his practice was an experience, a way to spend time with people – including his dying mother, Lucie – but also to immortalise, to cheat death, and transcend flesh.
But there’s perhaps another purpose to Freud’s dynastic portraits. Here we see an artist conscious of cementing himself in high society, and the art history of North London. ‘Life is short, the Art long,’ he recalls – an idea which endures to the present, as merch made by the wealthy younger generations litters the gallery gift shop on exit.
Family is at the fore at the Freud Museum, the former Hampstead home of the painter’s grandfather Sigmund Freud, currently showing Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family. Most of Freud’s paintings were of his mother, herself an art historian. ‘I’m not in the picture,’ Lucie once remarked, in reference to her position in the family, and as an older woman in society. But here, she’s ‘in all of the pictures’, as the artist famously replied.
Unlike in New Perspectives, we see Lucie full of life. If Freud’s idea that all art is ‘purely biographical’ is to be believed, then here is the closest we can get to understanding the role that women played in his practice. (Small in size - and disappointingly, captions – there’s nevertheless a wealth to be found in the accompanying exhibition book.)
As her favourite child, Freud once said he felt ‘stifled’ by his mother. He was grateful for having a distant father, and thus parental balance. Having two supportive parents would have led him to rebel and become a jockey instead – the smallest of nods to his privilege.
Zimmerlinde dominate the Freud family home; all reputed descendants of those first planted by Sigmund Freud in Vienna and brought with him in his flight from Nazi persecution to the UK in 1938. Cut, propagated, and shared, the plant has since become an ‘unofficial family emblem’ – and commodified as a gift to be purchased.
If Freud’s comfortable family home reflects his life of ‘middle-class luxury’, these roots and their social connections are the unintended subject of the unmissable Plant Portraits at the Garden Museum.
In Paris, 1946, Freud met with Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. In 1959, he painted cyclamen flowers in the 11th Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s Chatsworth bathroom.
Banana trees speak to his travels to - and detached gaze upon – Jamaica. His artworks are artefacts of his desire for ‘the primitive simplicity of a temporary exotic haven’ – painted from the residence of the James Bond author Ian Fleming in 1953.
The Garden Museum hints at connections between the botany of the empire, and Freud’s own practices of collection. Context comes in captions; the artist liked the Tuscan turf so much, he brought it back with him to London to complete his painting, ‘Landscape’ (1993).
The artist had always paid attention to detail in his surroundings, drawing Christmas cacti and the deep roots of plants from an early age. Plant Portraits mirrors such detail in its curation, carving space for fresh insights on Freud’s practice. Diversely curated with book illustrations, archive photographs, and a whole bathroom installed with the artist’s paint boxes – it is small and perfectly informed.
Freud drew much from the art teacher and plantsman Cedric Morris – who saw the ‘ruthlessness, strength, and lust’, not prettiness, of plants. He soon started depicting plant-human interactions, often using plants in place of people, creating intimate portraits and strikingly modern works.
With Friends and Relations, Gagosian lingers in the people of London, showing Freud amongst his friends and artistic influences. We see how four men – Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – none of whom were born in London, made the city their home, immortalising the glamorous Colony Club, the small and sordid windows of inner-city townhouses, and its famous people, through art.
Freud was the only one to collect from his contemporaries; Bacon painted twenty portraits of Freud in the 1960s, some of which feature, but it is more intriguing to see these friends curated in conversation, tracing the connections between works.
With Frank Auerbach, Freud shared an interest in the artist-model relationship, and a similar approach to texture and impasto. Still, Freud’s realistic nudes are more detached and voyeuristic. The only abstraction comes in the naked portraits of his adult daughter, Bella, her name and relationship to him absent in his titles, with Gagosian restoring her identity in subtle captions.
Accompanying photographs by Bruce Bernard show Freud draped over Celia Paul, playing with the adult Bella, and standing on his head – more glimpses into the artist’s character, as well as the wider social scene. Though monochrome, they create a sense of fun, humour, mirroring their warm relationships; when Freud’s 1952 portrait of Francis Bacon was stolen from West Berlin’s Nationalgalerie in 1992, he responded by producing a wanted poster, also on show.
United by an ‘unshakeable belief in the value of figurative art in a time of abstraction,’ these four artists contributed to the wider post-humanist movement of the 1960s onwards, but it is their playfulness – and privilege - that we take away from this exhibition.
Interior Life at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert adds layers to our understanding of the young socialite portrayed at Gagosian. Focusing on his late printmaking from 1982, with accompanying photographs by David Dawson, we see his more mature practice – and lifelong continuities in his approach.
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert delves the deepest into Freud’s artistic process. Etchings nestle beside their original copper plates, along with drawings and watercolours. The artist’s mother and father are depicted in different media, representations of their different characters, as hinted at in his family home.
Taken during the artist’s days of rest, and immediately after his death in 2011, David Dawson’s photographs also document Freud’s practice – and, through his practice, his personality. They offer lenses on the stories behind the National Gallery’s great works, using doors and walls as palettes, and source photographs of David Hockney sitting for his portrait.
So let the artist’s infamy endure – but let us look at it even more closely than before.
Lucian Freud: New Perspectives is on view at the National Gallery until 22 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family is on view at the Freud Museum until 29 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits is on view at the Garden Museum until 5 March 2023.
Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – and Bruce Bernard: Portraits of Friends - is on view at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill until 28 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Interior Life is on view at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert until 16 December 2022.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
'A visit to the gallery is like going to the doctor,’ so said Lucian Freud. And fans of the artist certainly won’t suffer for lack of appointments or a long waiting list, with a number of London shows celebrating the centenary of the artist’s birth.
A landmark exhibition at the National Gallery, New Perspectives shows Freud at his grandest scale, an artistic giant with dimension-bending works. It’s expectedly conservative – glossing over, not engaging with, his ‘controversial life’ – but its limited captions do let his astonishing works speak for themselves.
But there’s even more to be gained by lingering over the details. His flesh is phenomenal, faces stippled with paint to the point of disgust. Non-finito (unfinished) works from his later career evidence his continued experimentation. Self-portraits speak to his own practice, and his tendency to clean his brushes against his studio walls.
Freud may have dissociated himself from Neue Sachlichkeit - the German New Objectivity movement - but we can’t help but recall Otto Dix in many of his society portraits. Their large, grasping hands are blunt displays of patriarchal power.
His painting of Celia Paul, by contrast, only superficially inverts the power dynamic. Though portrayed as an artist, we still see her through the man artist’s gaze. Her apron is covered in textured paint like his studio walls – herself, a canvas to be painted on, her body the place of disposal and cleaning of paint. (His other students, like Paula Rego, can also be found across the city.)
New Perspectives does engage with how the artist saw the purpose of art. For Freud, his practice was an experience, a way to spend time with people – including his dying mother, Lucie – but also to immortalise, to cheat death, and transcend flesh.
But there’s perhaps another purpose to Freud’s dynastic portraits. Here we see an artist conscious of cementing himself in high society, and the art history of North London. ‘Life is short, the Art long,’ he recalls – an idea which endures to the present, as merch made by the wealthy younger generations litters the gallery gift shop on exit.
Family is at the fore at the Freud Museum, the former Hampstead home of the painter’s grandfather Sigmund Freud, currently showing Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family. Most of Freud’s paintings were of his mother, herself an art historian. ‘I’m not in the picture,’ Lucie once remarked, in reference to her position in the family, and as an older woman in society. But here, she’s ‘in all of the pictures’, as the artist famously replied.
Unlike in New Perspectives, we see Lucie full of life. If Freud’s idea that all art is ‘purely biographical’ is to be believed, then here is the closest we can get to understanding the role that women played in his practice. (Small in size - and disappointingly, captions – there’s nevertheless a wealth to be found in the accompanying exhibition book.)
As her favourite child, Freud once said he felt ‘stifled’ by his mother. He was grateful for having a distant father, and thus parental balance. Having two supportive parents would have led him to rebel and become a jockey instead – the smallest of nods to his privilege.
Zimmerlinde dominate the Freud family home; all reputed descendants of those first planted by Sigmund Freud in Vienna and brought with him in his flight from Nazi persecution to the UK in 1938. Cut, propagated, and shared, the plant has since become an ‘unofficial family emblem’ – and commodified as a gift to be purchased.
If Freud’s comfortable family home reflects his life of ‘middle-class luxury’, these roots and their social connections are the unintended subject of the unmissable Plant Portraits at the Garden Museum.
In Paris, 1946, Freud met with Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. In 1959, he painted cyclamen flowers in the 11th Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s Chatsworth bathroom.
Banana trees speak to his travels to - and detached gaze upon – Jamaica. His artworks are artefacts of his desire for ‘the primitive simplicity of a temporary exotic haven’ – painted from the residence of the James Bond author Ian Fleming in 1953.
The Garden Museum hints at connections between the botany of the empire, and Freud’s own practices of collection. Context comes in captions; the artist liked the Tuscan turf so much, he brought it back with him to London to complete his painting, ‘Landscape’ (1993).
The artist had always paid attention to detail in his surroundings, drawing Christmas cacti and the deep roots of plants from an early age. Plant Portraits mirrors such detail in its curation, carving space for fresh insights on Freud’s practice. Diversely curated with book illustrations, archive photographs, and a whole bathroom installed with the artist’s paint boxes – it is small and perfectly informed.
Freud drew much from the art teacher and plantsman Cedric Morris – who saw the ‘ruthlessness, strength, and lust’, not prettiness, of plants. He soon started depicting plant-human interactions, often using plants in place of people, creating intimate portraits and strikingly modern works.
With Friends and Relations, Gagosian lingers in the people of London, showing Freud amongst his friends and artistic influences. We see how four men – Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – none of whom were born in London, made the city their home, immortalising the glamorous Colony Club, the small and sordid windows of inner-city townhouses, and its famous people, through art.
Freud was the only one to collect from his contemporaries; Bacon painted twenty portraits of Freud in the 1960s, some of which feature, but it is more intriguing to see these friends curated in conversation, tracing the connections between works.
With Frank Auerbach, Freud shared an interest in the artist-model relationship, and a similar approach to texture and impasto. Still, Freud’s realistic nudes are more detached and voyeuristic. The only abstraction comes in the naked portraits of his adult daughter, Bella, her name and relationship to him absent in his titles, with Gagosian restoring her identity in subtle captions.
Accompanying photographs by Bruce Bernard show Freud draped over Celia Paul, playing with the adult Bella, and standing on his head – more glimpses into the artist’s character, as well as the wider social scene. Though monochrome, they create a sense of fun, humour, mirroring their warm relationships; when Freud’s 1952 portrait of Francis Bacon was stolen from West Berlin’s Nationalgalerie in 1992, he responded by producing a wanted poster, also on show.
United by an ‘unshakeable belief in the value of figurative art in a time of abstraction,’ these four artists contributed to the wider post-humanist movement of the 1960s onwards, but it is their playfulness – and privilege - that we take away from this exhibition.
Interior Life at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert adds layers to our understanding of the young socialite portrayed at Gagosian. Focusing on his late printmaking from 1982, with accompanying photographs by David Dawson, we see his more mature practice – and lifelong continuities in his approach.
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert delves the deepest into Freud’s artistic process. Etchings nestle beside their original copper plates, along with drawings and watercolours. The artist’s mother and father are depicted in different media, representations of their different characters, as hinted at in his family home.
Taken during the artist’s days of rest, and immediately after his death in 2011, David Dawson’s photographs also document Freud’s practice – and, through his practice, his personality. They offer lenses on the stories behind the National Gallery’s great works, using doors and walls as palettes, and source photographs of David Hockney sitting for his portrait.
So let the artist’s infamy endure – but let us look at it even more closely than before.
Lucian Freud: New Perspectives is on view at the National Gallery until 22 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family is on view at the Freud Museum until 29 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits is on view at the Garden Museum until 5 March 2023.
Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – and Bruce Bernard: Portraits of Friends - is on view at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill until 28 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Interior Life is on view at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert until 16 December 2022.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
'A visit to the gallery is like going to the doctor,’ so said Lucian Freud. And fans of the artist certainly won’t suffer for lack of appointments or a long waiting list, with a number of London shows celebrating the centenary of the artist’s birth.
A landmark exhibition at the National Gallery, New Perspectives shows Freud at his grandest scale, an artistic giant with dimension-bending works. It’s expectedly conservative – glossing over, not engaging with, his ‘controversial life’ – but its limited captions do let his astonishing works speak for themselves.
But there’s even more to be gained by lingering over the details. His flesh is phenomenal, faces stippled with paint to the point of disgust. Non-finito (unfinished) works from his later career evidence his continued experimentation. Self-portraits speak to his own practice, and his tendency to clean his brushes against his studio walls.
Freud may have dissociated himself from Neue Sachlichkeit - the German New Objectivity movement - but we can’t help but recall Otto Dix in many of his society portraits. Their large, grasping hands are blunt displays of patriarchal power.
His painting of Celia Paul, by contrast, only superficially inverts the power dynamic. Though portrayed as an artist, we still see her through the man artist’s gaze. Her apron is covered in textured paint like his studio walls – herself, a canvas to be painted on, her body the place of disposal and cleaning of paint. (His other students, like Paula Rego, can also be found across the city.)
New Perspectives does engage with how the artist saw the purpose of art. For Freud, his practice was an experience, a way to spend time with people – including his dying mother, Lucie – but also to immortalise, to cheat death, and transcend flesh.
But there’s perhaps another purpose to Freud’s dynastic portraits. Here we see an artist conscious of cementing himself in high society, and the art history of North London. ‘Life is short, the Art long,’ he recalls – an idea which endures to the present, as merch made by the wealthy younger generations litters the gallery gift shop on exit.
Family is at the fore at the Freud Museum, the former Hampstead home of the painter’s grandfather Sigmund Freud, currently showing Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family. Most of Freud’s paintings were of his mother, herself an art historian. ‘I’m not in the picture,’ Lucie once remarked, in reference to her position in the family, and as an older woman in society. But here, she’s ‘in all of the pictures’, as the artist famously replied.
Unlike in New Perspectives, we see Lucie full of life. If Freud’s idea that all art is ‘purely biographical’ is to be believed, then here is the closest we can get to understanding the role that women played in his practice. (Small in size - and disappointingly, captions – there’s nevertheless a wealth to be found in the accompanying exhibition book.)
As her favourite child, Freud once said he felt ‘stifled’ by his mother. He was grateful for having a distant father, and thus parental balance. Having two supportive parents would have led him to rebel and become a jockey instead – the smallest of nods to his privilege.
Zimmerlinde dominate the Freud family home; all reputed descendants of those first planted by Sigmund Freud in Vienna and brought with him in his flight from Nazi persecution to the UK in 1938. Cut, propagated, and shared, the plant has since become an ‘unofficial family emblem’ – and commodified as a gift to be purchased.
If Freud’s comfortable family home reflects his life of ‘middle-class luxury’, these roots and their social connections are the unintended subject of the unmissable Plant Portraits at the Garden Museum.
In Paris, 1946, Freud met with Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. In 1959, he painted cyclamen flowers in the 11th Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s Chatsworth bathroom.
Banana trees speak to his travels to - and detached gaze upon – Jamaica. His artworks are artefacts of his desire for ‘the primitive simplicity of a temporary exotic haven’ – painted from the residence of the James Bond author Ian Fleming in 1953.
The Garden Museum hints at connections between the botany of the empire, and Freud’s own practices of collection. Context comes in captions; the artist liked the Tuscan turf so much, he brought it back with him to London to complete his painting, ‘Landscape’ (1993).
The artist had always paid attention to detail in his surroundings, drawing Christmas cacti and the deep roots of plants from an early age. Plant Portraits mirrors such detail in its curation, carving space for fresh insights on Freud’s practice. Diversely curated with book illustrations, archive photographs, and a whole bathroom installed with the artist’s paint boxes – it is small and perfectly informed.
Freud drew much from the art teacher and plantsman Cedric Morris – who saw the ‘ruthlessness, strength, and lust’, not prettiness, of plants. He soon started depicting plant-human interactions, often using plants in place of people, creating intimate portraits and strikingly modern works.
With Friends and Relations, Gagosian lingers in the people of London, showing Freud amongst his friends and artistic influences. We see how four men – Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – none of whom were born in London, made the city their home, immortalising the glamorous Colony Club, the small and sordid windows of inner-city townhouses, and its famous people, through art.
Freud was the only one to collect from his contemporaries; Bacon painted twenty portraits of Freud in the 1960s, some of which feature, but it is more intriguing to see these friends curated in conversation, tracing the connections between works.
With Frank Auerbach, Freud shared an interest in the artist-model relationship, and a similar approach to texture and impasto. Still, Freud’s realistic nudes are more detached and voyeuristic. The only abstraction comes in the naked portraits of his adult daughter, Bella, her name and relationship to him absent in his titles, with Gagosian restoring her identity in subtle captions.
Accompanying photographs by Bruce Bernard show Freud draped over Celia Paul, playing with the adult Bella, and standing on his head – more glimpses into the artist’s character, as well as the wider social scene. Though monochrome, they create a sense of fun, humour, mirroring their warm relationships; when Freud’s 1952 portrait of Francis Bacon was stolen from West Berlin’s Nationalgalerie in 1992, he responded by producing a wanted poster, also on show.
United by an ‘unshakeable belief in the value of figurative art in a time of abstraction,’ these four artists contributed to the wider post-humanist movement of the 1960s onwards, but it is their playfulness – and privilege - that we take away from this exhibition.
Interior Life at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert adds layers to our understanding of the young socialite portrayed at Gagosian. Focusing on his late printmaking from 1982, with accompanying photographs by David Dawson, we see his more mature practice – and lifelong continuities in his approach.
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert delves the deepest into Freud’s artistic process. Etchings nestle beside their original copper plates, along with drawings and watercolours. The artist’s mother and father are depicted in different media, representations of their different characters, as hinted at in his family home.
Taken during the artist’s days of rest, and immediately after his death in 2011, David Dawson’s photographs also document Freud’s practice – and, through his practice, his personality. They offer lenses on the stories behind the National Gallery’s great works, using doors and walls as palettes, and source photographs of David Hockney sitting for his portrait.
So let the artist’s infamy endure – but let us look at it even more closely than before.
Lucian Freud: New Perspectives is on view at the National Gallery until 22 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family is on view at the Freud Museum until 29 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits is on view at the Garden Museum until 5 March 2023.
Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – and Bruce Bernard: Portraits of Friends - is on view at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill until 28 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Interior Life is on view at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert until 16 December 2022.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
'A visit to the gallery is like going to the doctor,’ so said Lucian Freud. And fans of the artist certainly won’t suffer for lack of appointments or a long waiting list, with a number of London shows celebrating the centenary of the artist’s birth.
A landmark exhibition at the National Gallery, New Perspectives shows Freud at his grandest scale, an artistic giant with dimension-bending works. It’s expectedly conservative – glossing over, not engaging with, his ‘controversial life’ – but its limited captions do let his astonishing works speak for themselves.
But there’s even more to be gained by lingering over the details. His flesh is phenomenal, faces stippled with paint to the point of disgust. Non-finito (unfinished) works from his later career evidence his continued experimentation. Self-portraits speak to his own practice, and his tendency to clean his brushes against his studio walls.
Freud may have dissociated himself from Neue Sachlichkeit - the German New Objectivity movement - but we can’t help but recall Otto Dix in many of his society portraits. Their large, grasping hands are blunt displays of patriarchal power.
His painting of Celia Paul, by contrast, only superficially inverts the power dynamic. Though portrayed as an artist, we still see her through the man artist’s gaze. Her apron is covered in textured paint like his studio walls – herself, a canvas to be painted on, her body the place of disposal and cleaning of paint. (His other students, like Paula Rego, can also be found across the city.)
New Perspectives does engage with how the artist saw the purpose of art. For Freud, his practice was an experience, a way to spend time with people – including his dying mother, Lucie – but also to immortalise, to cheat death, and transcend flesh.
But there’s perhaps another purpose to Freud’s dynastic portraits. Here we see an artist conscious of cementing himself in high society, and the art history of North London. ‘Life is short, the Art long,’ he recalls – an idea which endures to the present, as merch made by the wealthy younger generations litters the gallery gift shop on exit.
Family is at the fore at the Freud Museum, the former Hampstead home of the painter’s grandfather Sigmund Freud, currently showing Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family. Most of Freud’s paintings were of his mother, herself an art historian. ‘I’m not in the picture,’ Lucie once remarked, in reference to her position in the family, and as an older woman in society. But here, she’s ‘in all of the pictures’, as the artist famously replied.
Unlike in New Perspectives, we see Lucie full of life. If Freud’s idea that all art is ‘purely biographical’ is to be believed, then here is the closest we can get to understanding the role that women played in his practice. (Small in size - and disappointingly, captions – there’s nevertheless a wealth to be found in the accompanying exhibition book.)
As her favourite child, Freud once said he felt ‘stifled’ by his mother. He was grateful for having a distant father, and thus parental balance. Having two supportive parents would have led him to rebel and become a jockey instead – the smallest of nods to his privilege.
Zimmerlinde dominate the Freud family home; all reputed descendants of those first planted by Sigmund Freud in Vienna and brought with him in his flight from Nazi persecution to the UK in 1938. Cut, propagated, and shared, the plant has since become an ‘unofficial family emblem’ – and commodified as a gift to be purchased.
If Freud’s comfortable family home reflects his life of ‘middle-class luxury’, these roots and their social connections are the unintended subject of the unmissable Plant Portraits at the Garden Museum.
In Paris, 1946, Freud met with Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. In 1959, he painted cyclamen flowers in the 11th Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s Chatsworth bathroom.
Banana trees speak to his travels to - and detached gaze upon – Jamaica. His artworks are artefacts of his desire for ‘the primitive simplicity of a temporary exotic haven’ – painted from the residence of the James Bond author Ian Fleming in 1953.
The Garden Museum hints at connections between the botany of the empire, and Freud’s own practices of collection. Context comes in captions; the artist liked the Tuscan turf so much, he brought it back with him to London to complete his painting, ‘Landscape’ (1993).
The artist had always paid attention to detail in his surroundings, drawing Christmas cacti and the deep roots of plants from an early age. Plant Portraits mirrors such detail in its curation, carving space for fresh insights on Freud’s practice. Diversely curated with book illustrations, archive photographs, and a whole bathroom installed with the artist’s paint boxes – it is small and perfectly informed.
Freud drew much from the art teacher and plantsman Cedric Morris – who saw the ‘ruthlessness, strength, and lust’, not prettiness, of plants. He soon started depicting plant-human interactions, often using plants in place of people, creating intimate portraits and strikingly modern works.
With Friends and Relations, Gagosian lingers in the people of London, showing Freud amongst his friends and artistic influences. We see how four men – Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – none of whom were born in London, made the city their home, immortalising the glamorous Colony Club, the small and sordid windows of inner-city townhouses, and its famous people, through art.
Freud was the only one to collect from his contemporaries; Bacon painted twenty portraits of Freud in the 1960s, some of which feature, but it is more intriguing to see these friends curated in conversation, tracing the connections between works.
With Frank Auerbach, Freud shared an interest in the artist-model relationship, and a similar approach to texture and impasto. Still, Freud’s realistic nudes are more detached and voyeuristic. The only abstraction comes in the naked portraits of his adult daughter, Bella, her name and relationship to him absent in his titles, with Gagosian restoring her identity in subtle captions.
Accompanying photographs by Bruce Bernard show Freud draped over Celia Paul, playing with the adult Bella, and standing on his head – more glimpses into the artist’s character, as well as the wider social scene. Though monochrome, they create a sense of fun, humour, mirroring their warm relationships; when Freud’s 1952 portrait of Francis Bacon was stolen from West Berlin’s Nationalgalerie in 1992, he responded by producing a wanted poster, also on show.
United by an ‘unshakeable belief in the value of figurative art in a time of abstraction,’ these four artists contributed to the wider post-humanist movement of the 1960s onwards, but it is their playfulness – and privilege - that we take away from this exhibition.
Interior Life at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert adds layers to our understanding of the young socialite portrayed at Gagosian. Focusing on his late printmaking from 1982, with accompanying photographs by David Dawson, we see his more mature practice – and lifelong continuities in his approach.
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert delves the deepest into Freud’s artistic process. Etchings nestle beside their original copper plates, along with drawings and watercolours. The artist’s mother and father are depicted in different media, representations of their different characters, as hinted at in his family home.
Taken during the artist’s days of rest, and immediately after his death in 2011, David Dawson’s photographs also document Freud’s practice – and, through his practice, his personality. They offer lenses on the stories behind the National Gallery’s great works, using doors and walls as palettes, and source photographs of David Hockney sitting for his portrait.
So let the artist’s infamy endure – but let us look at it even more closely than before.
Lucian Freud: New Perspectives is on view at the National Gallery until 22 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family is on view at the Freud Museum until 29 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits is on view at the Garden Museum until 5 March 2023.
Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – and Bruce Bernard: Portraits of Friends - is on view at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill until 28 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Interior Life is on view at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert until 16 December 2022.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
'A visit to the gallery is like going to the doctor,’ so said Lucian Freud. And fans of the artist certainly won’t suffer for lack of appointments or a long waiting list, with a number of London shows celebrating the centenary of the artist’s birth.
A landmark exhibition at the National Gallery, New Perspectives shows Freud at his grandest scale, an artistic giant with dimension-bending works. It’s expectedly conservative – glossing over, not engaging with, his ‘controversial life’ – but its limited captions do let his astonishing works speak for themselves.
But there’s even more to be gained by lingering over the details. His flesh is phenomenal, faces stippled with paint to the point of disgust. Non-finito (unfinished) works from his later career evidence his continued experimentation. Self-portraits speak to his own practice, and his tendency to clean his brushes against his studio walls.
Freud may have dissociated himself from Neue Sachlichkeit - the German New Objectivity movement - but we can’t help but recall Otto Dix in many of his society portraits. Their large, grasping hands are blunt displays of patriarchal power.
His painting of Celia Paul, by contrast, only superficially inverts the power dynamic. Though portrayed as an artist, we still see her through the man artist’s gaze. Her apron is covered in textured paint like his studio walls – herself, a canvas to be painted on, her body the place of disposal and cleaning of paint. (His other students, like Paula Rego, can also be found across the city.)
New Perspectives does engage with how the artist saw the purpose of art. For Freud, his practice was an experience, a way to spend time with people – including his dying mother, Lucie – but also to immortalise, to cheat death, and transcend flesh.
But there’s perhaps another purpose to Freud’s dynastic portraits. Here we see an artist conscious of cementing himself in high society, and the art history of North London. ‘Life is short, the Art long,’ he recalls – an idea which endures to the present, as merch made by the wealthy younger generations litters the gallery gift shop on exit.
Family is at the fore at the Freud Museum, the former Hampstead home of the painter’s grandfather Sigmund Freud, currently showing Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family. Most of Freud’s paintings were of his mother, herself an art historian. ‘I’m not in the picture,’ Lucie once remarked, in reference to her position in the family, and as an older woman in society. But here, she’s ‘in all of the pictures’, as the artist famously replied.
Unlike in New Perspectives, we see Lucie full of life. If Freud’s idea that all art is ‘purely biographical’ is to be believed, then here is the closest we can get to understanding the role that women played in his practice. (Small in size - and disappointingly, captions – there’s nevertheless a wealth to be found in the accompanying exhibition book.)
As her favourite child, Freud once said he felt ‘stifled’ by his mother. He was grateful for having a distant father, and thus parental balance. Having two supportive parents would have led him to rebel and become a jockey instead – the smallest of nods to his privilege.
Zimmerlinde dominate the Freud family home; all reputed descendants of those first planted by Sigmund Freud in Vienna and brought with him in his flight from Nazi persecution to the UK in 1938. Cut, propagated, and shared, the plant has since become an ‘unofficial family emblem’ – and commodified as a gift to be purchased.
If Freud’s comfortable family home reflects his life of ‘middle-class luxury’, these roots and their social connections are the unintended subject of the unmissable Plant Portraits at the Garden Museum.
In Paris, 1946, Freud met with Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. In 1959, he painted cyclamen flowers in the 11th Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s Chatsworth bathroom.
Banana trees speak to his travels to - and detached gaze upon – Jamaica. His artworks are artefacts of his desire for ‘the primitive simplicity of a temporary exotic haven’ – painted from the residence of the James Bond author Ian Fleming in 1953.
The Garden Museum hints at connections between the botany of the empire, and Freud’s own practices of collection. Context comes in captions; the artist liked the Tuscan turf so much, he brought it back with him to London to complete his painting, ‘Landscape’ (1993).
The artist had always paid attention to detail in his surroundings, drawing Christmas cacti and the deep roots of plants from an early age. Plant Portraits mirrors such detail in its curation, carving space for fresh insights on Freud’s practice. Diversely curated with book illustrations, archive photographs, and a whole bathroom installed with the artist’s paint boxes – it is small and perfectly informed.
Freud drew much from the art teacher and plantsman Cedric Morris – who saw the ‘ruthlessness, strength, and lust’, not prettiness, of plants. He soon started depicting plant-human interactions, often using plants in place of people, creating intimate portraits and strikingly modern works.
With Friends and Relations, Gagosian lingers in the people of London, showing Freud amongst his friends and artistic influences. We see how four men – Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – none of whom were born in London, made the city their home, immortalising the glamorous Colony Club, the small and sordid windows of inner-city townhouses, and its famous people, through art.
Freud was the only one to collect from his contemporaries; Bacon painted twenty portraits of Freud in the 1960s, some of which feature, but it is more intriguing to see these friends curated in conversation, tracing the connections between works.
With Frank Auerbach, Freud shared an interest in the artist-model relationship, and a similar approach to texture and impasto. Still, Freud’s realistic nudes are more detached and voyeuristic. The only abstraction comes in the naked portraits of his adult daughter, Bella, her name and relationship to him absent in his titles, with Gagosian restoring her identity in subtle captions.
Accompanying photographs by Bruce Bernard show Freud draped over Celia Paul, playing with the adult Bella, and standing on his head – more glimpses into the artist’s character, as well as the wider social scene. Though monochrome, they create a sense of fun, humour, mirroring their warm relationships; when Freud’s 1952 portrait of Francis Bacon was stolen from West Berlin’s Nationalgalerie in 1992, he responded by producing a wanted poster, also on show.
United by an ‘unshakeable belief in the value of figurative art in a time of abstraction,’ these four artists contributed to the wider post-humanist movement of the 1960s onwards, but it is their playfulness – and privilege - that we take away from this exhibition.
Interior Life at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert adds layers to our understanding of the young socialite portrayed at Gagosian. Focusing on his late printmaking from 1982, with accompanying photographs by David Dawson, we see his more mature practice – and lifelong continuities in his approach.
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert delves the deepest into Freud’s artistic process. Etchings nestle beside their original copper plates, along with drawings and watercolours. The artist’s mother and father are depicted in different media, representations of their different characters, as hinted at in his family home.
Taken during the artist’s days of rest, and immediately after his death in 2011, David Dawson’s photographs also document Freud’s practice – and, through his practice, his personality. They offer lenses on the stories behind the National Gallery’s great works, using doors and walls as palettes, and source photographs of David Hockney sitting for his portrait.
So let the artist’s infamy endure – but let us look at it even more closely than before.
Lucian Freud: New Perspectives is on view at the National Gallery until 22 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family is on view at the Freud Museum until 29 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits is on view at the Garden Museum until 5 March 2023.
Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – and Bruce Bernard: Portraits of Friends - is on view at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill until 28 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Interior Life is on view at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert until 16 December 2022.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
'A visit to the gallery is like going to the doctor,’ so said Lucian Freud. And fans of the artist certainly won’t suffer for lack of appointments or a long waiting list, with a number of London shows celebrating the centenary of the artist’s birth.
A landmark exhibition at the National Gallery, New Perspectives shows Freud at his grandest scale, an artistic giant with dimension-bending works. It’s expectedly conservative – glossing over, not engaging with, his ‘controversial life’ – but its limited captions do let his astonishing works speak for themselves.
But there’s even more to be gained by lingering over the details. His flesh is phenomenal, faces stippled with paint to the point of disgust. Non-finito (unfinished) works from his later career evidence his continued experimentation. Self-portraits speak to his own practice, and his tendency to clean his brushes against his studio walls.
Freud may have dissociated himself from Neue Sachlichkeit - the German New Objectivity movement - but we can’t help but recall Otto Dix in many of his society portraits. Their large, grasping hands are blunt displays of patriarchal power.
His painting of Celia Paul, by contrast, only superficially inverts the power dynamic. Though portrayed as an artist, we still see her through the man artist’s gaze. Her apron is covered in textured paint like his studio walls – herself, a canvas to be painted on, her body the place of disposal and cleaning of paint. (His other students, like Paula Rego, can also be found across the city.)
New Perspectives does engage with how the artist saw the purpose of art. For Freud, his practice was an experience, a way to spend time with people – including his dying mother, Lucie – but also to immortalise, to cheat death, and transcend flesh.
But there’s perhaps another purpose to Freud’s dynastic portraits. Here we see an artist conscious of cementing himself in high society, and the art history of North London. ‘Life is short, the Art long,’ he recalls – an idea which endures to the present, as merch made by the wealthy younger generations litters the gallery gift shop on exit.
Family is at the fore at the Freud Museum, the former Hampstead home of the painter’s grandfather Sigmund Freud, currently showing Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family. Most of Freud’s paintings were of his mother, herself an art historian. ‘I’m not in the picture,’ Lucie once remarked, in reference to her position in the family, and as an older woman in society. But here, she’s ‘in all of the pictures’, as the artist famously replied.
Unlike in New Perspectives, we see Lucie full of life. If Freud’s idea that all art is ‘purely biographical’ is to be believed, then here is the closest we can get to understanding the role that women played in his practice. (Small in size - and disappointingly, captions – there’s nevertheless a wealth to be found in the accompanying exhibition book.)
As her favourite child, Freud once said he felt ‘stifled’ by his mother. He was grateful for having a distant father, and thus parental balance. Having two supportive parents would have led him to rebel and become a jockey instead – the smallest of nods to his privilege.
Zimmerlinde dominate the Freud family home; all reputed descendants of those first planted by Sigmund Freud in Vienna and brought with him in his flight from Nazi persecution to the UK in 1938. Cut, propagated, and shared, the plant has since become an ‘unofficial family emblem’ – and commodified as a gift to be purchased.
If Freud’s comfortable family home reflects his life of ‘middle-class luxury’, these roots and their social connections are the unintended subject of the unmissable Plant Portraits at the Garden Museum.
In Paris, 1946, Freud met with Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. In 1959, he painted cyclamen flowers in the 11th Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s Chatsworth bathroom.
Banana trees speak to his travels to - and detached gaze upon – Jamaica. His artworks are artefacts of his desire for ‘the primitive simplicity of a temporary exotic haven’ – painted from the residence of the James Bond author Ian Fleming in 1953.
The Garden Museum hints at connections between the botany of the empire, and Freud’s own practices of collection. Context comes in captions; the artist liked the Tuscan turf so much, he brought it back with him to London to complete his painting, ‘Landscape’ (1993).
The artist had always paid attention to detail in his surroundings, drawing Christmas cacti and the deep roots of plants from an early age. Plant Portraits mirrors such detail in its curation, carving space for fresh insights on Freud’s practice. Diversely curated with book illustrations, archive photographs, and a whole bathroom installed with the artist’s paint boxes – it is small and perfectly informed.
Freud drew much from the art teacher and plantsman Cedric Morris – who saw the ‘ruthlessness, strength, and lust’, not prettiness, of plants. He soon started depicting plant-human interactions, often using plants in place of people, creating intimate portraits and strikingly modern works.
With Friends and Relations, Gagosian lingers in the people of London, showing Freud amongst his friends and artistic influences. We see how four men – Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – none of whom were born in London, made the city their home, immortalising the glamorous Colony Club, the small and sordid windows of inner-city townhouses, and its famous people, through art.
Freud was the only one to collect from his contemporaries; Bacon painted twenty portraits of Freud in the 1960s, some of which feature, but it is more intriguing to see these friends curated in conversation, tracing the connections between works.
With Frank Auerbach, Freud shared an interest in the artist-model relationship, and a similar approach to texture and impasto. Still, Freud’s realistic nudes are more detached and voyeuristic. The only abstraction comes in the naked portraits of his adult daughter, Bella, her name and relationship to him absent in his titles, with Gagosian restoring her identity in subtle captions.
Accompanying photographs by Bruce Bernard show Freud draped over Celia Paul, playing with the adult Bella, and standing on his head – more glimpses into the artist’s character, as well as the wider social scene. Though monochrome, they create a sense of fun, humour, mirroring their warm relationships; when Freud’s 1952 portrait of Francis Bacon was stolen from West Berlin’s Nationalgalerie in 1992, he responded by producing a wanted poster, also on show.
United by an ‘unshakeable belief in the value of figurative art in a time of abstraction,’ these four artists contributed to the wider post-humanist movement of the 1960s onwards, but it is their playfulness – and privilege - that we take away from this exhibition.
Interior Life at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert adds layers to our understanding of the young socialite portrayed at Gagosian. Focusing on his late printmaking from 1982, with accompanying photographs by David Dawson, we see his more mature practice – and lifelong continuities in his approach.
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert delves the deepest into Freud’s artistic process. Etchings nestle beside their original copper plates, along with drawings and watercolours. The artist’s mother and father are depicted in different media, representations of their different characters, as hinted at in his family home.
Taken during the artist’s days of rest, and immediately after his death in 2011, David Dawson’s photographs also document Freud’s practice – and, through his practice, his personality. They offer lenses on the stories behind the National Gallery’s great works, using doors and walls as palettes, and source photographs of David Hockney sitting for his portrait.
So let the artist’s infamy endure – but let us look at it even more closely than before.
Lucian Freud: New Perspectives is on view at the National Gallery until 22 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family is on view at the Freud Museum until 29 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits is on view at the Garden Museum until 5 March 2023.
Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – and Bruce Bernard: Portraits of Friends - is on view at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill until 28 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Interior Life is on view at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert until 16 December 2022.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
'A visit to the gallery is like going to the doctor,’ so said Lucian Freud. And fans of the artist certainly won’t suffer for lack of appointments or a long waiting list, with a number of London shows celebrating the centenary of the artist’s birth.
A landmark exhibition at the National Gallery, New Perspectives shows Freud at his grandest scale, an artistic giant with dimension-bending works. It’s expectedly conservative – glossing over, not engaging with, his ‘controversial life’ – but its limited captions do let his astonishing works speak for themselves.
But there’s even more to be gained by lingering over the details. His flesh is phenomenal, faces stippled with paint to the point of disgust. Non-finito (unfinished) works from his later career evidence his continued experimentation. Self-portraits speak to his own practice, and his tendency to clean his brushes against his studio walls.
Freud may have dissociated himself from Neue Sachlichkeit - the German New Objectivity movement - but we can’t help but recall Otto Dix in many of his society portraits. Their large, grasping hands are blunt displays of patriarchal power.
His painting of Celia Paul, by contrast, only superficially inverts the power dynamic. Though portrayed as an artist, we still see her through the man artist’s gaze. Her apron is covered in textured paint like his studio walls – herself, a canvas to be painted on, her body the place of disposal and cleaning of paint. (His other students, like Paula Rego, can also be found across the city.)
New Perspectives does engage with how the artist saw the purpose of art. For Freud, his practice was an experience, a way to spend time with people – including his dying mother, Lucie – but also to immortalise, to cheat death, and transcend flesh.
But there’s perhaps another purpose to Freud’s dynastic portraits. Here we see an artist conscious of cementing himself in high society, and the art history of North London. ‘Life is short, the Art long,’ he recalls – an idea which endures to the present, as merch made by the wealthy younger generations litters the gallery gift shop on exit.
Family is at the fore at the Freud Museum, the former Hampstead home of the painter’s grandfather Sigmund Freud, currently showing Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family. Most of Freud’s paintings were of his mother, herself an art historian. ‘I’m not in the picture,’ Lucie once remarked, in reference to her position in the family, and as an older woman in society. But here, she’s ‘in all of the pictures’, as the artist famously replied.
Unlike in New Perspectives, we see Lucie full of life. If Freud’s idea that all art is ‘purely biographical’ is to be believed, then here is the closest we can get to understanding the role that women played in his practice. (Small in size - and disappointingly, captions – there’s nevertheless a wealth to be found in the accompanying exhibition book.)
As her favourite child, Freud once said he felt ‘stifled’ by his mother. He was grateful for having a distant father, and thus parental balance. Having two supportive parents would have led him to rebel and become a jockey instead – the smallest of nods to his privilege.
Zimmerlinde dominate the Freud family home; all reputed descendants of those first planted by Sigmund Freud in Vienna and brought with him in his flight from Nazi persecution to the UK in 1938. Cut, propagated, and shared, the plant has since become an ‘unofficial family emblem’ – and commodified as a gift to be purchased.
If Freud’s comfortable family home reflects his life of ‘middle-class luxury’, these roots and their social connections are the unintended subject of the unmissable Plant Portraits at the Garden Museum.
In Paris, 1946, Freud met with Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. In 1959, he painted cyclamen flowers in the 11th Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s Chatsworth bathroom.
Banana trees speak to his travels to - and detached gaze upon – Jamaica. His artworks are artefacts of his desire for ‘the primitive simplicity of a temporary exotic haven’ – painted from the residence of the James Bond author Ian Fleming in 1953.
The Garden Museum hints at connections between the botany of the empire, and Freud’s own practices of collection. Context comes in captions; the artist liked the Tuscan turf so much, he brought it back with him to London to complete his painting, ‘Landscape’ (1993).
The artist had always paid attention to detail in his surroundings, drawing Christmas cacti and the deep roots of plants from an early age. Plant Portraits mirrors such detail in its curation, carving space for fresh insights on Freud’s practice. Diversely curated with book illustrations, archive photographs, and a whole bathroom installed with the artist’s paint boxes – it is small and perfectly informed.
Freud drew much from the art teacher and plantsman Cedric Morris – who saw the ‘ruthlessness, strength, and lust’, not prettiness, of plants. He soon started depicting plant-human interactions, often using plants in place of people, creating intimate portraits and strikingly modern works.
With Friends and Relations, Gagosian lingers in the people of London, showing Freud amongst his friends and artistic influences. We see how four men – Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – none of whom were born in London, made the city their home, immortalising the glamorous Colony Club, the small and sordid windows of inner-city townhouses, and its famous people, through art.
Freud was the only one to collect from his contemporaries; Bacon painted twenty portraits of Freud in the 1960s, some of which feature, but it is more intriguing to see these friends curated in conversation, tracing the connections between works.
With Frank Auerbach, Freud shared an interest in the artist-model relationship, and a similar approach to texture and impasto. Still, Freud’s realistic nudes are more detached and voyeuristic. The only abstraction comes in the naked portraits of his adult daughter, Bella, her name and relationship to him absent in his titles, with Gagosian restoring her identity in subtle captions.
Accompanying photographs by Bruce Bernard show Freud draped over Celia Paul, playing with the adult Bella, and standing on his head – more glimpses into the artist’s character, as well as the wider social scene. Though monochrome, they create a sense of fun, humour, mirroring their warm relationships; when Freud’s 1952 portrait of Francis Bacon was stolen from West Berlin’s Nationalgalerie in 1992, he responded by producing a wanted poster, also on show.
United by an ‘unshakeable belief in the value of figurative art in a time of abstraction,’ these four artists contributed to the wider post-humanist movement of the 1960s onwards, but it is their playfulness – and privilege - that we take away from this exhibition.
Interior Life at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert adds layers to our understanding of the young socialite portrayed at Gagosian. Focusing on his late printmaking from 1982, with accompanying photographs by David Dawson, we see his more mature practice – and lifelong continuities in his approach.
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert delves the deepest into Freud’s artistic process. Etchings nestle beside their original copper plates, along with drawings and watercolours. The artist’s mother and father are depicted in different media, representations of their different characters, as hinted at in his family home.
Taken during the artist’s days of rest, and immediately after his death in 2011, David Dawson’s photographs also document Freud’s practice – and, through his practice, his personality. They offer lenses on the stories behind the National Gallery’s great works, using doors and walls as palettes, and source photographs of David Hockney sitting for his portrait.
So let the artist’s infamy endure – but let us look at it even more closely than before.
Lucian Freud: New Perspectives is on view at the National Gallery until 22 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family is on view at the Freud Museum until 29 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits is on view at the Garden Museum until 5 March 2023.
Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – and Bruce Bernard: Portraits of Friends - is on view at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill until 28 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Interior Life is on view at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert until 16 December 2022.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
'A visit to the gallery is like going to the doctor,’ so said Lucian Freud. And fans of the artist certainly won’t suffer for lack of appointments or a long waiting list, with a number of London shows celebrating the centenary of the artist’s birth.
A landmark exhibition at the National Gallery, New Perspectives shows Freud at his grandest scale, an artistic giant with dimension-bending works. It’s expectedly conservative – glossing over, not engaging with, his ‘controversial life’ – but its limited captions do let his astonishing works speak for themselves.
But there’s even more to be gained by lingering over the details. His flesh is phenomenal, faces stippled with paint to the point of disgust. Non-finito (unfinished) works from his later career evidence his continued experimentation. Self-portraits speak to his own practice, and his tendency to clean his brushes against his studio walls.
Freud may have dissociated himself from Neue Sachlichkeit - the German New Objectivity movement - but we can’t help but recall Otto Dix in many of his society portraits. Their large, grasping hands are blunt displays of patriarchal power.
His painting of Celia Paul, by contrast, only superficially inverts the power dynamic. Though portrayed as an artist, we still see her through the man artist’s gaze. Her apron is covered in textured paint like his studio walls – herself, a canvas to be painted on, her body the place of disposal and cleaning of paint. (His other students, like Paula Rego, can also be found across the city.)
New Perspectives does engage with how the artist saw the purpose of art. For Freud, his practice was an experience, a way to spend time with people – including his dying mother, Lucie – but also to immortalise, to cheat death, and transcend flesh.
But there’s perhaps another purpose to Freud’s dynastic portraits. Here we see an artist conscious of cementing himself in high society, and the art history of North London. ‘Life is short, the Art long,’ he recalls – an idea which endures to the present, as merch made by the wealthy younger generations litters the gallery gift shop on exit.
Family is at the fore at the Freud Museum, the former Hampstead home of the painter’s grandfather Sigmund Freud, currently showing Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family. Most of Freud’s paintings were of his mother, herself an art historian. ‘I’m not in the picture,’ Lucie once remarked, in reference to her position in the family, and as an older woman in society. But here, she’s ‘in all of the pictures’, as the artist famously replied.
Unlike in New Perspectives, we see Lucie full of life. If Freud’s idea that all art is ‘purely biographical’ is to be believed, then here is the closest we can get to understanding the role that women played in his practice. (Small in size - and disappointingly, captions – there’s nevertheless a wealth to be found in the accompanying exhibition book.)
As her favourite child, Freud once said he felt ‘stifled’ by his mother. He was grateful for having a distant father, and thus parental balance. Having two supportive parents would have led him to rebel and become a jockey instead – the smallest of nods to his privilege.
Zimmerlinde dominate the Freud family home; all reputed descendants of those first planted by Sigmund Freud in Vienna and brought with him in his flight from Nazi persecution to the UK in 1938. Cut, propagated, and shared, the plant has since become an ‘unofficial family emblem’ – and commodified as a gift to be purchased.
If Freud’s comfortable family home reflects his life of ‘middle-class luxury’, these roots and their social connections are the unintended subject of the unmissable Plant Portraits at the Garden Museum.
In Paris, 1946, Freud met with Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. In 1959, he painted cyclamen flowers in the 11th Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s Chatsworth bathroom.
Banana trees speak to his travels to - and detached gaze upon – Jamaica. His artworks are artefacts of his desire for ‘the primitive simplicity of a temporary exotic haven’ – painted from the residence of the James Bond author Ian Fleming in 1953.
The Garden Museum hints at connections between the botany of the empire, and Freud’s own practices of collection. Context comes in captions; the artist liked the Tuscan turf so much, he brought it back with him to London to complete his painting, ‘Landscape’ (1993).
The artist had always paid attention to detail in his surroundings, drawing Christmas cacti and the deep roots of plants from an early age. Plant Portraits mirrors such detail in its curation, carving space for fresh insights on Freud’s practice. Diversely curated with book illustrations, archive photographs, and a whole bathroom installed with the artist’s paint boxes – it is small and perfectly informed.
Freud drew much from the art teacher and plantsman Cedric Morris – who saw the ‘ruthlessness, strength, and lust’, not prettiness, of plants. He soon started depicting plant-human interactions, often using plants in place of people, creating intimate portraits and strikingly modern works.
With Friends and Relations, Gagosian lingers in the people of London, showing Freud amongst his friends and artistic influences. We see how four men – Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – none of whom were born in London, made the city their home, immortalising the glamorous Colony Club, the small and sordid windows of inner-city townhouses, and its famous people, through art.
Freud was the only one to collect from his contemporaries; Bacon painted twenty portraits of Freud in the 1960s, some of which feature, but it is more intriguing to see these friends curated in conversation, tracing the connections between works.
With Frank Auerbach, Freud shared an interest in the artist-model relationship, and a similar approach to texture and impasto. Still, Freud’s realistic nudes are more detached and voyeuristic. The only abstraction comes in the naked portraits of his adult daughter, Bella, her name and relationship to him absent in his titles, with Gagosian restoring her identity in subtle captions.
Accompanying photographs by Bruce Bernard show Freud draped over Celia Paul, playing with the adult Bella, and standing on his head – more glimpses into the artist’s character, as well as the wider social scene. Though monochrome, they create a sense of fun, humour, mirroring their warm relationships; when Freud’s 1952 portrait of Francis Bacon was stolen from West Berlin’s Nationalgalerie in 1992, he responded by producing a wanted poster, also on show.
United by an ‘unshakeable belief in the value of figurative art in a time of abstraction,’ these four artists contributed to the wider post-humanist movement of the 1960s onwards, but it is their playfulness – and privilege - that we take away from this exhibition.
Interior Life at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert adds layers to our understanding of the young socialite portrayed at Gagosian. Focusing on his late printmaking from 1982, with accompanying photographs by David Dawson, we see his more mature practice – and lifelong continuities in his approach.
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert delves the deepest into Freud’s artistic process. Etchings nestle beside their original copper plates, along with drawings and watercolours. The artist’s mother and father are depicted in different media, representations of their different characters, as hinted at in his family home.
Taken during the artist’s days of rest, and immediately after his death in 2011, David Dawson’s photographs also document Freud’s practice – and, through his practice, his personality. They offer lenses on the stories behind the National Gallery’s great works, using doors and walls as palettes, and source photographs of David Hockney sitting for his portrait.
So let the artist’s infamy endure – but let us look at it even more closely than before.
Lucian Freud: New Perspectives is on view at the National Gallery until 22 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family is on view at the Freud Museum until 29 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits is on view at the Garden Museum until 5 March 2023.
Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – and Bruce Bernard: Portraits of Friends - is on view at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill until 28 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Interior Life is on view at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert until 16 December 2022.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
'A visit to the gallery is like going to the doctor,’ so said Lucian Freud. And fans of the artist certainly won’t suffer for lack of appointments or a long waiting list, with a number of London shows celebrating the centenary of the artist’s birth.
A landmark exhibition at the National Gallery, New Perspectives shows Freud at his grandest scale, an artistic giant with dimension-bending works. It’s expectedly conservative – glossing over, not engaging with, his ‘controversial life’ – but its limited captions do let his astonishing works speak for themselves.
But there’s even more to be gained by lingering over the details. His flesh is phenomenal, faces stippled with paint to the point of disgust. Non-finito (unfinished) works from his later career evidence his continued experimentation. Self-portraits speak to his own practice, and his tendency to clean his brushes against his studio walls.
Freud may have dissociated himself from Neue Sachlichkeit - the German New Objectivity movement - but we can’t help but recall Otto Dix in many of his society portraits. Their large, grasping hands are blunt displays of patriarchal power.
His painting of Celia Paul, by contrast, only superficially inverts the power dynamic. Though portrayed as an artist, we still see her through the man artist’s gaze. Her apron is covered in textured paint like his studio walls – herself, a canvas to be painted on, her body the place of disposal and cleaning of paint. (His other students, like Paula Rego, can also be found across the city.)
New Perspectives does engage with how the artist saw the purpose of art. For Freud, his practice was an experience, a way to spend time with people – including his dying mother, Lucie – but also to immortalise, to cheat death, and transcend flesh.
But there’s perhaps another purpose to Freud’s dynastic portraits. Here we see an artist conscious of cementing himself in high society, and the art history of North London. ‘Life is short, the Art long,’ he recalls – an idea which endures to the present, as merch made by the wealthy younger generations litters the gallery gift shop on exit.
Family is at the fore at the Freud Museum, the former Hampstead home of the painter’s grandfather Sigmund Freud, currently showing Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family. Most of Freud’s paintings were of his mother, herself an art historian. ‘I’m not in the picture,’ Lucie once remarked, in reference to her position in the family, and as an older woman in society. But here, she’s ‘in all of the pictures’, as the artist famously replied.
Unlike in New Perspectives, we see Lucie full of life. If Freud’s idea that all art is ‘purely biographical’ is to be believed, then here is the closest we can get to understanding the role that women played in his practice. (Small in size - and disappointingly, captions – there’s nevertheless a wealth to be found in the accompanying exhibition book.)
As her favourite child, Freud once said he felt ‘stifled’ by his mother. He was grateful for having a distant father, and thus parental balance. Having two supportive parents would have led him to rebel and become a jockey instead – the smallest of nods to his privilege.
Zimmerlinde dominate the Freud family home; all reputed descendants of those first planted by Sigmund Freud in Vienna and brought with him in his flight from Nazi persecution to the UK in 1938. Cut, propagated, and shared, the plant has since become an ‘unofficial family emblem’ – and commodified as a gift to be purchased.
If Freud’s comfortable family home reflects his life of ‘middle-class luxury’, these roots and their social connections are the unintended subject of the unmissable Plant Portraits at the Garden Museum.
In Paris, 1946, Freud met with Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. In 1959, he painted cyclamen flowers in the 11th Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s Chatsworth bathroom.
Banana trees speak to his travels to - and detached gaze upon – Jamaica. His artworks are artefacts of his desire for ‘the primitive simplicity of a temporary exotic haven’ – painted from the residence of the James Bond author Ian Fleming in 1953.
The Garden Museum hints at connections between the botany of the empire, and Freud’s own practices of collection. Context comes in captions; the artist liked the Tuscan turf so much, he brought it back with him to London to complete his painting, ‘Landscape’ (1993).
The artist had always paid attention to detail in his surroundings, drawing Christmas cacti and the deep roots of plants from an early age. Plant Portraits mirrors such detail in its curation, carving space for fresh insights on Freud’s practice. Diversely curated with book illustrations, archive photographs, and a whole bathroom installed with the artist’s paint boxes – it is small and perfectly informed.
Freud drew much from the art teacher and plantsman Cedric Morris – who saw the ‘ruthlessness, strength, and lust’, not prettiness, of plants. He soon started depicting plant-human interactions, often using plants in place of people, creating intimate portraits and strikingly modern works.
With Friends and Relations, Gagosian lingers in the people of London, showing Freud amongst his friends and artistic influences. We see how four men – Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – none of whom were born in London, made the city their home, immortalising the glamorous Colony Club, the small and sordid windows of inner-city townhouses, and its famous people, through art.
Freud was the only one to collect from his contemporaries; Bacon painted twenty portraits of Freud in the 1960s, some of which feature, but it is more intriguing to see these friends curated in conversation, tracing the connections between works.
With Frank Auerbach, Freud shared an interest in the artist-model relationship, and a similar approach to texture and impasto. Still, Freud’s realistic nudes are more detached and voyeuristic. The only abstraction comes in the naked portraits of his adult daughter, Bella, her name and relationship to him absent in his titles, with Gagosian restoring her identity in subtle captions.
Accompanying photographs by Bruce Bernard show Freud draped over Celia Paul, playing with the adult Bella, and standing on his head – more glimpses into the artist’s character, as well as the wider social scene. Though monochrome, they create a sense of fun, humour, mirroring their warm relationships; when Freud’s 1952 portrait of Francis Bacon was stolen from West Berlin’s Nationalgalerie in 1992, he responded by producing a wanted poster, also on show.
United by an ‘unshakeable belief in the value of figurative art in a time of abstraction,’ these four artists contributed to the wider post-humanist movement of the 1960s onwards, but it is their playfulness – and privilege - that we take away from this exhibition.
Interior Life at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert adds layers to our understanding of the young socialite portrayed at Gagosian. Focusing on his late printmaking from 1982, with accompanying photographs by David Dawson, we see his more mature practice – and lifelong continuities in his approach.
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert delves the deepest into Freud’s artistic process. Etchings nestle beside their original copper plates, along with drawings and watercolours. The artist’s mother and father are depicted in different media, representations of their different characters, as hinted at in his family home.
Taken during the artist’s days of rest, and immediately after his death in 2011, David Dawson’s photographs also document Freud’s practice – and, through his practice, his personality. They offer lenses on the stories behind the National Gallery’s great works, using doors and walls as palettes, and source photographs of David Hockney sitting for his portrait.
So let the artist’s infamy endure – but let us look at it even more closely than before.
Lucian Freud: New Perspectives is on view at the National Gallery until 22 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family is on view at the Freud Museum until 29 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits is on view at the Garden Museum until 5 March 2023.
Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – and Bruce Bernard: Portraits of Friends - is on view at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill until 28 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Interior Life is on view at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert until 16 December 2022.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
'A visit to the gallery is like going to the doctor,’ so said Lucian Freud. And fans of the artist certainly won’t suffer for lack of appointments or a long waiting list, with a number of London shows celebrating the centenary of the artist’s birth.
A landmark exhibition at the National Gallery, New Perspectives shows Freud at his grandest scale, an artistic giant with dimension-bending works. It’s expectedly conservative – glossing over, not engaging with, his ‘controversial life’ – but its limited captions do let his astonishing works speak for themselves.
But there’s even more to be gained by lingering over the details. His flesh is phenomenal, faces stippled with paint to the point of disgust. Non-finito (unfinished) works from his later career evidence his continued experimentation. Self-portraits speak to his own practice, and his tendency to clean his brushes against his studio walls.
Freud may have dissociated himself from Neue Sachlichkeit - the German New Objectivity movement - but we can’t help but recall Otto Dix in many of his society portraits. Their large, grasping hands are blunt displays of patriarchal power.
His painting of Celia Paul, by contrast, only superficially inverts the power dynamic. Though portrayed as an artist, we still see her through the man artist’s gaze. Her apron is covered in textured paint like his studio walls – herself, a canvas to be painted on, her body the place of disposal and cleaning of paint. (His other students, like Paula Rego, can also be found across the city.)
New Perspectives does engage with how the artist saw the purpose of art. For Freud, his practice was an experience, a way to spend time with people – including his dying mother, Lucie – but also to immortalise, to cheat death, and transcend flesh.
But there’s perhaps another purpose to Freud’s dynastic portraits. Here we see an artist conscious of cementing himself in high society, and the art history of North London. ‘Life is short, the Art long,’ he recalls – an idea which endures to the present, as merch made by the wealthy younger generations litters the gallery gift shop on exit.
Family is at the fore at the Freud Museum, the former Hampstead home of the painter’s grandfather Sigmund Freud, currently showing Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family. Most of Freud’s paintings were of his mother, herself an art historian. ‘I’m not in the picture,’ Lucie once remarked, in reference to her position in the family, and as an older woman in society. But here, she’s ‘in all of the pictures’, as the artist famously replied.
Unlike in New Perspectives, we see Lucie full of life. If Freud’s idea that all art is ‘purely biographical’ is to be believed, then here is the closest we can get to understanding the role that women played in his practice. (Small in size - and disappointingly, captions – there’s nevertheless a wealth to be found in the accompanying exhibition book.)
As her favourite child, Freud once said he felt ‘stifled’ by his mother. He was grateful for having a distant father, and thus parental balance. Having two supportive parents would have led him to rebel and become a jockey instead – the smallest of nods to his privilege.
Zimmerlinde dominate the Freud family home; all reputed descendants of those first planted by Sigmund Freud in Vienna and brought with him in his flight from Nazi persecution to the UK in 1938. Cut, propagated, and shared, the plant has since become an ‘unofficial family emblem’ – and commodified as a gift to be purchased.
If Freud’s comfortable family home reflects his life of ‘middle-class luxury’, these roots and their social connections are the unintended subject of the unmissable Plant Portraits at the Garden Museum.
In Paris, 1946, Freud met with Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. In 1959, he painted cyclamen flowers in the 11th Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s Chatsworth bathroom.
Banana trees speak to his travels to - and detached gaze upon – Jamaica. His artworks are artefacts of his desire for ‘the primitive simplicity of a temporary exotic haven’ – painted from the residence of the James Bond author Ian Fleming in 1953.
The Garden Museum hints at connections between the botany of the empire, and Freud’s own practices of collection. Context comes in captions; the artist liked the Tuscan turf so much, he brought it back with him to London to complete his painting, ‘Landscape’ (1993).
The artist had always paid attention to detail in his surroundings, drawing Christmas cacti and the deep roots of plants from an early age. Plant Portraits mirrors such detail in its curation, carving space for fresh insights on Freud’s practice. Diversely curated with book illustrations, archive photographs, and a whole bathroom installed with the artist’s paint boxes – it is small and perfectly informed.
Freud drew much from the art teacher and plantsman Cedric Morris – who saw the ‘ruthlessness, strength, and lust’, not prettiness, of plants. He soon started depicting plant-human interactions, often using plants in place of people, creating intimate portraits and strikingly modern works.
With Friends and Relations, Gagosian lingers in the people of London, showing Freud amongst his friends and artistic influences. We see how four men – Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – none of whom were born in London, made the city their home, immortalising the glamorous Colony Club, the small and sordid windows of inner-city townhouses, and its famous people, through art.
Freud was the only one to collect from his contemporaries; Bacon painted twenty portraits of Freud in the 1960s, some of which feature, but it is more intriguing to see these friends curated in conversation, tracing the connections between works.
With Frank Auerbach, Freud shared an interest in the artist-model relationship, and a similar approach to texture and impasto. Still, Freud’s realistic nudes are more detached and voyeuristic. The only abstraction comes in the naked portraits of his adult daughter, Bella, her name and relationship to him absent in his titles, with Gagosian restoring her identity in subtle captions.
Accompanying photographs by Bruce Bernard show Freud draped over Celia Paul, playing with the adult Bella, and standing on his head – more glimpses into the artist’s character, as well as the wider social scene. Though monochrome, they create a sense of fun, humour, mirroring their warm relationships; when Freud’s 1952 portrait of Francis Bacon was stolen from West Berlin’s Nationalgalerie in 1992, he responded by producing a wanted poster, also on show.
United by an ‘unshakeable belief in the value of figurative art in a time of abstraction,’ these four artists contributed to the wider post-humanist movement of the 1960s onwards, but it is their playfulness – and privilege - that we take away from this exhibition.
Interior Life at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert adds layers to our understanding of the young socialite portrayed at Gagosian. Focusing on his late printmaking from 1982, with accompanying photographs by David Dawson, we see his more mature practice – and lifelong continuities in his approach.
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert delves the deepest into Freud’s artistic process. Etchings nestle beside their original copper plates, along with drawings and watercolours. The artist’s mother and father are depicted in different media, representations of their different characters, as hinted at in his family home.
Taken during the artist’s days of rest, and immediately after his death in 2011, David Dawson’s photographs also document Freud’s practice – and, through his practice, his personality. They offer lenses on the stories behind the National Gallery’s great works, using doors and walls as palettes, and source photographs of David Hockney sitting for his portrait.
So let the artist’s infamy endure – but let us look at it even more closely than before.
Lucian Freud: New Perspectives is on view at the National Gallery until 22 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family is on view at the Freud Museum until 29 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits is on view at the Garden Museum until 5 March 2023.
Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews – and Bruce Bernard: Portraits of Friends - is on view at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill until 28 January 2023.
Lucian Freud: Interior Life is on view at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert until 16 December 2022.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!
