also see Lucian Freud’s Self-Portraits
LUCIAN FREUD (British, 1922-2011) had a massive exhibit called “Recent Works” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York during my Winter Break 1993, and when I flew out and visited my sister there, we wound up in this exhibit. We stumbled onto it, unprepared. I wasn’t familiar wtih Freud’s work, and it jolted me. I was truly disturbed, but still fascinated by his work. I did not like it, but I could not shake it. The paint was thickly applied on his portraits in a way that appeared like sickly, discolored, mottled, rash-or-scab-covered skin. The subjects looked like ugly, rotting, nude corpses to me, many of them obese. The imagery felt psychologically unsettling, and it hung over me long afterwards. Even though it repelled me, I couldn’t shake the thought of it. I did not like the work at all, but I could not rid myself of its effect on me. The psychology inherent in the work became so obviously self-evident when I realized he was the grandson of FREUD. I later learned how his thick layers of paint could accumulate over hours and months or longer of painting each image, recording the large commitment of time from his very patient subjects who sat for what must have felt like an eternity, as he fanatically examined and endeavored to reproduce every fold and blemish he could see, an accumulating snapshot of time passing, measured in thickness of paint layers.
Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:
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