盧西安·弗洛伊德

James Kirkman Ltd., London 

Private Collection

Christie’s, London, Contemporary Art, 3 December 1992, Lot 55

Private Collection (acquired from the above sale)

Thence by descent to the present owner

London, Whitechapel Gallery; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Lucian Freud: Recent Work, 1993-94, n.p., no. 60, illustrated in colour  

Bruce Bernard and Derek Birdsall, Eds., Lucian Freud, London 1996, n.p., no. 241, illustrated in colour

William Feaver, Lucian Freud, London 2007, n.p., no. 243, illustrated in colour

Exh. Cat., Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou, Lucian Freud: L’Atelier, 2010, p. 65, no. 2, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is lighter and less pink in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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“My work is purely autobiographical. It is about myself and my surroundings. It is an attempt at a record. I work from people that interest me and that I care about, in rooms that I live in and know. I use the people to invent my pictures with, and I can work more freely when they are there.”

Lucian Freud, quoted in: Exh. Cat., London, National Portrait Gallery, Lucian Freud: Portraits, 2012, p. 14.

Every painting by Lucian Freud is the outcome of a separate, intensely felt experience, and Annabel, in which the British master realist turned his exacting gaze and brush towards his daughter, Annabel, is no exception. Born in 1952, Annabel is Freud's second eldest child after Annie Freud, and is a daughter from artist's first marriage to Kitty Garman; they married in 1948 and separated around the time Annabel was born. Where he carefully selects his models from amongst his close friends and family, Freud’s work is enriched by its often intimate and autobiographical content. “It’s good,” he once said, “to breed your own models,” and throughout his long career the artist painted his children with singular attentiveness and consistency (Lucian Freud quoted in: William Feaver, ‘Freud at the Correr: Fifty Years’ in: Exh. Cat., Venice, Museo Correr, Lucian Freud, 2005, p. 36). Endowed with a special care and devotion, as collaborative products between father and daughter as well as artist and sitter, Freud’s portraits of his daughters provide pictorial realisations of a paternal dialogue as well as of artistic development. With the knowledge that Annabel is the artist’s daughter, the viewer brings their own complex baggage about parental relationships to the image, and yet, as in all of Freud’s nudes, the painting remains a powerful document of the human body. With the confidence and expression of his mature style, Freud’s dense and bold brushwork has captured the physicality and psychology of his sitter on a truly intimate scale. Indeed, the artist frequently mentioned how he liked to be challenged by the dimensions of a painting, be it diminutive in proportion such as the present work, or imposing in size, such as Annabel and Rattler from 1997, and liked to work on paintings of contrasting scale at the same time. Although rendered on this preciously sized canvas Annabel records the fleshy immediacy and ephemerality of the human form.

Freud's oeuvre is remarkable for its individualistic vision, revealing a highly intelligent and disciplined painter; although he attended various progressive schools and art colleges, he learned about painting and art history from within the confines of his studio. One of Freud’s friends, the photographer Bruce Bernard, thought of him as “the most prodigiously self-taught artist in history… He learned much of what has happened in art over six hundred years while almost hermetically sealed in his studio with his models” (Bruce Bernard quoted in: Exh. Cat., London, National Portrait Gallery, Lucian Freud: Portraits, 2012, p. 17). In the present work, it is possible to see the influence of the sculptures of Rodin and Matisse, who Freud acknowledged as inspiring his approach to capturing the raw physicality of his subjects. Insisting on the presence and instability of a live model, Annabel’s seated pose and downward gaze also recalls several of Gauguin’s paintings of Tahitian women.

As the curator Michael Auping has written, “Freud’s brush never settled into predictable patterns. Layers of paint were built up almost like subcutaneous tissue, and the attentive, subtle energy that is reflected in Freud’s brush strokes is analogous to the pulsating liquidity of the breathing body that was in front of him” (Michael Auping, ‘Freud from America’, in: ibid., p. 47). Freud remixed almost every stroke of paint on his small, hand-held palette, often using the wall of the studio to mix the colours. In Annabel, the bodily presence of the artist in the studio is recorded in the thick, congealed paint on the background wall, an enduring testament to the talents of one of the most mesmerising personalities of twentieth-century art history.