盧西安·弗洛伊德

Private Collection, London 

Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London

R. B. Kitaj, London

Christie’s, London, The Collection of R. B. Kitaj, 7 February 2008, Lot 328

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Rome, Palazzo Ruspoli; Milan, Castello Sforzesca; Liverpool, Tate Gallery; Tochigi, Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts; Nishinomiya, Otani Memorial Museum; Tokyo, Setagaya Art Museum; Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales; and Perth, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Lucian Freud: Paintings and Works on Paper 1941-1991, 1991-93, p. 85, no. 58, illustrated (Milan, Liverpool and Sydney); and p. 84, no. 54, illustrated (Tochigi, Otani and Tokyo)

London, Tate Britain; Barcelona, Fundació La Caixa; and Los Angeles, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Lucian Freud, 2002-03, n.p., no. 34, illustrated in colour

London, National Portrait Gallery; and Fort Worth, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Lucian Freud: Portraits, 2012, p. 83, no. 22, illustrated in colour 

Bruce Bernard and Derek Birdsall, Eds., Lucian Freud, London 1996, n.p., no. 76, illustrated in colour

William Feaver, Lucian Freud, New York 2007, n.p., no. 69, illustrated in colour

Exh. Cat., Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou, Lucian Freud: L’Atelier, 2010, p. 39, no. 2, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tone of the paper is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The work is attached verso to the backing board in several places. The left edge is perforated. There is some discolouration to the edges, as visible in the catalogue illustration. There is a tapering vertical crease which starts in the lower left corner and goes along the left edge. Close inspection reveals two small spots of skinning to the very top edge, one to the left centre and one to the right centre, and a few spots of foxing in isolated places.
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Belonging to a series of three studies of Francis Bacon executed by Lucian Freud in 1951, the present work encapsulates a truly extraordinary and reciprocal artistic friendship. With graphic aplomb this drawing confidently captures both the essence of Bacon’s likeness and his artistic being: with trousers and shirt unbuttoned, bare chest displayed, and his characteristic moon-face seductively bowed, this drawing reflects Bacon’s attitude to art, that it should “unlock the valves of feeling” (Francis Bacon quoted in: William Feaver, Lucian Freud, New York 2007, p. 20). Displaying the most confident line, resolved pose, and compelling likeness from the group of three, the present work is a masterful graphic rendering of a man whose youthfulness famously belied his age: though relatively early in his career, Bacon was already 43 at the time of this work’s creation. First owned by the respected art journalist Robert Melville, the drawing was later acquired by fellow ‘School of London’ alumnus R.B. Kitaj with whom it resided until 2008. Furthermore, widely exhibited in the majority of major retrospectives of Freud’s work and reproduced extensively in literature on the artist, Francis Bacon forms a keystone of Lucian Freud’s fabled production.  

One year later in 1952 Freud would once again capture Bacon’s likeness, but this time in paint. This small work on copper (stolen in 1988, the location of this work today remains unknown) is one of the most incredible feats of the Freud’s career, a painting described by Robert Hughes as “a grenade the split second it explodes”, and a painting that Bacon himself deemed a true portrait (Robert Hughes quoted in: Bruce Bernard and Derek Birdsall, Eds., Lucian Freud, London 1996, p. 12). Freud returned a final time to paint Bacon’s likeness between 1956 and 1957 in an ‘unfinished’ work on canvas; however it is these drawings from 1951 that mark the creative meeting of these two extraordinary like-minds, these two self-taught giants of twentieth-century postwar painting.

The year of this work’s creation was also the year in which Bacon first painted Freud. In Portrait of Lucian Freud of 1952 the younger artist is pictured barging into a room, a solemn ghostly figure cast against Bacon’s idiosyncratic abyssal ground and merged with a likeness of Franz Kafka gleaned from a book or newspaper. Freud’s Baconian visage would metamorphose over the coming years with the turn of Bacon’s art towards his inner social circle, and herein Freud would become one of the most important subjects of this artist’s mature practice; the tremendous Three Studies of Lucian Freud from 1969 utterly defines the height of Francis Bacon’s painterly virtuosity. For Freud, who had known Bacon since 1944, the intoxicating influence of this elder artist, his ruthless scrutiny of humanity and fearless portrayal of the human body, impacted a dramatic transformation in his own work. As the artist himself acknowledged: "I think that Francis’ way of painting freely helped me feel more daring” (Lucian Freud quoted in: ‘A Late-Night conversation with Lucian Freud’, Sebastian Smee, Freud at Work, London 2006, p. 18). Veering away from the graphic style of his earlier practice, during the 1950s Freud turned towards a rendering of the human form without scruples, a translation of the body focussed on the minutiae of corporal and psychological detail. Indeed, where Freud’s likeness unlocked many of Francis Bacon’s most extraordinary images, Bacon was the key to Lucian Freud’s utterly ground-breaking approach to the human body in paint.