19 October/20 October 2019 ★ FT Weekend 15
Arts | Collecting
A
n autobiography in paint:
a handful of artists — Rem-
brandt, Van Gogh, Picasso
— have achieved that, and
in our epoch only one.
“I couldn’t scrap it because then I’d be
doing away with myself,” Lucian Freud
moaned when his 1993 self-portrait
“Painter Working, Reflection” was pro-
ceeding painfully slowly. Freud, who
mercilessly created then depicted “the
anguish of his sitters”, as his wife Caro-
line Blackwood put it, admitted being a
lousy model: “I don’t accept the infor-
mation that I get when I look at myself,
that’s where the trouble starts.” From
that tension came a dozen of the
supreme masterpieces of Freud’s career.
They form an arc of self-scrutiny in
youth, middle age,final years, unfold-
ing, like Rembrandt’s self-depictions, a
decade-by-decade personal journey and
also the evolution of an endlessly inven-
tive, enthralling painterly manner. The
chance to see these works together,with
scores of drawings and etchings, in the
Royal Academy’sLucian Freud: The Self-
portraits, opening next week, is unprece-
dented: a celebration, and an enigma —
of time, change, the leitmotifs of a life
distilled on canvas.
How, you wonder, could the pale,
awkward 21-year-old “Man with a
Feather”, tie skewed, hands elongated, a
totem in sparse, smoothly linear Neue
Sachlichkeit style, possibly become the
frail, melancholy 80-year-old clutching
a scarf to his neck like a noose in
“Self-portrait, Reflection”? This Freud
stands before a paint-encrusted wall
livid with the grey-beige-pinkish brush-
strokes of his fleshy late manner;
the earlier one traps himself in crystal-
line surrealist intrigue — a darkened
Hitchcockian house with menacing‘I want to paint myself to death’
Royal Academy A gathering of all|
Lucian Freud’s self-portraits offers an
enthralling glimpse into a life distilled
on canvas, writesJackie Wullschläger
Clockwise from
main picture:
‘Reflection with
Two Children
(Self-portrait)’
(1965);
‘Man with a
Feather’ (1943);
‘Hotel Bedroom’
(1954);
‘Self-portrait,
Reflection’
(2002)
The Lucian Freud Archive/
Bridgeman Imagesfigures and a sea of geometric icebergs.
But — of course — young and old
Freud are the same person: steady
gaze, unflinching attitude, chasing “a
kind of truth-telling” of intense obser-
vation, leavened by the flair of theatrical
performance.
“I’m not very introspective but I was
shy, so I tried to overcome it by being
exhibitionistic,” Freud explained. Aged
24, he depicts himself in “Man with a
Thistle” (1946) — wide-eyed, spiky-
haired, as threatening as the outlandish
prickly plant on a plinth before him. In
“Still Life with Green Lemon” (1947) he
is a sinister sliver of watchfulness,
cropped thin face sidelong to a large flat
leaf. Then the voyeur is endangered: in
the horned “Self-portrait as Actaeon”
(1949) Freud becomes the Greek hero
transformed into a stag, torn to pieces
by his hounds for glimpsingDiana.
Strikingly often, the early self-
portraits focus closely on plants or ani-
mals; it was as biologist, not psycholo-
gist, that Freud identified with his
famous grandfather. Nevertheless, the
Freudian couch is recalled in the great-
est painting from the 1950s, “Hotel Bed-
room”. At the window, Lucian, sharp,
fox-featured, anatomising every detail,
lurks like a predator, backlit against a
narrow Paris street, peering at Caroline
huddled in bed. She is cold because he,
in a fit of frustration, has just smashed
the pane to let in more light; in thelimpid clarity he delineates in fine sable
brushes each strand of lank blond hair,
every blotch on her skin.
Freud was recording the decline of a
marriage. Its collapse marked the end of
his youthful style of enamelled artifice
and postwar alienation — the “Ingres of
existentialism”, as Herbert Read called
theartist. By the 1960s he was experi-
menting — especially in the freedom of
self-portraiture, such as a trio of ver-
sions of the angular, violently tilting
“Man’s Head (Self-portrait)” — with aListening (Self-portrait)”, Freud, a tiny
head and shoulders, hand cupped to ear,
confronts a jungle of leavesspreading
across the surface; he loathed symbol-
ism but inescapable is the impression of
an explorer seeking his own path.
For the nocturnal “Reflection with
Two Children (Self-portrait)”, Freud
placed a mirror at his feet, looking down
to depict himself steeply foreshortened,
with the ceiling lamp enlarged like a
searchlight.With swollen forehead and
twisted features, he looms like a colos-
sus swathed in grey. Superimposed on
his reflection are those of two minuscule
children, his son and daughter Ali and
Rose Boyt. Freud said he was inspired by
an Egyptian tomb family sculpture, but
in the games with mirrors, scale, power,
virtuosity, Velázquez’s “Las Meninas”,
is here too. So surely is a glimpse of
psychoanalytical perspective — we see
the giant Freud from his children’s
bewildered perspective, the potency of
the father.
The baroque dramas, the massive
forms tactile with weight and texture, of
the later years, are emerging here. “Self-
portrait with a Black Eye”, produced
after a bust-up with a cab driver in 1978,
is twice repeated in diminutive repro-
duction in the famous double portrait of
Freud’s bookie and his son “Two Irish-
men in W11”. From the 1980s on, cele-
brated, assured, gleefully teasing — no
one was more aware of self-portraiture
as an inherently playful, even self-
mocking genre — Freud slips fleeting
self-depictions into representations of
other people. He is a pair of disruptive
feet retreating from an ungainly nude
sprawled on a sofa in “Naked Portrait
with Reflection”, a shady apparition in
the window, head cut off by the blind, in“Freddy Standing” — an image of his 29-
year-old naked son, etiolated, down-
cast, cornered in an empty room.
“Revealing in a way that is almost
improper”, as Freud said he intended,
such harsh portraits are benchmarks
against which to appreciate the brutal
realism of “Painter Working, Reflec-
tion”. The 71-year-old Freud, naked
except for his unlaced boots (to avoid
splinters) stands under the glare of elec-
tric light on bare floorboards in his stu-
dio. Impasto is so thickly worked as to
be sculptural in the granulated effects of
sagging musculature, protruding veins,
knobbly knees, creased features; heav-
ily applied, cracking Cremnitz white
forces pockets of shadow. Freud,
expression alert, hawkish, is slightly
stooped but holds knife and palette like
a sword and shield; his thumb stuck
through the palette rhymes with his
knobby penis.
Urgent, robust, at once acknowledg-
ing and challenging vulnerability,
accepting mortality while answering it
with art, this picture is the pinnacle of
all the works from Freud’s final two dec-
ades — a triumphant enactment of his
resolution to stalk realism to the end:
“I want to paint myself to death.”October27-January26,RoyalAcademy,
London,royalacademy.org.uk
MuseumofFineArts,Boston,March1-
May25,mfa.org‘I don’t accept the
information I get when
I look at myself, that’swhere the trouble starts’
Ramsay Fairs, the group that owns the
Affordable Art Fair and Pulse Art Fair,
has bought Volta from Merchandise
Mart Properties Inc (MMPI), the
company that also runs New York’s
Armory Show. Volta was founded in
Basel in 2005 and New York in 2008,
and has proved popular but sits in an
uncomfortable spot between the
internationally renowned fairs and
cutting-edge boutique events. Volta’s
New York edition, which had run
alongside The Armory on Chelsea’s
Westside Piers for four years, suffered a
blow this March when it was cancelled
at the last minute. One of the Armory’s
two piers was deemed structurally
unsound so Volta’s exhibitors had to
make way for the bigger fair’s displaced
gallerists. Some of Volta’s 70 galleries
showed instead in David Zwirner’s
Chelsea space, to decent effect, but the
situation left a bad taste.
Slated for a new venue in 2020
(Metropolitan West, near the piers),
Ramsay Fairs promises “to invest more
in marketing and the fair experience”.
Chief executive Will Ramsay says there
are no plans to merge Volta with Pulse,
a satellite fair in Miami, though their
teams will work closely. His Affordable
Art Fair events, which celebrate their
20th anniversary in London’s Battersea
this week (October 17-20), remain
entirely separate. The terms of the sale
have not been disclosed.The Turkish painter and renaissance
man Osman Hamdi Bey (1842-1910) is
a rarity on the market, partly because
his work is deemed national patrimony
in his home country. So it’s unusual
that three of his works come to auction
in one month. Already sold, to the
Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, is his
“Young Woman Reading” (1880),
which made a substantial artist record
of £5.7m at Bonhams on September 26
(£6.7m with fees, est £600,000-
£800,000). This work is currently on
loan to the British Museum’sInspired by
the East xhibition (until January 26).e
Hamdi Bey’s record could get broken
again at Sotheby’s in London on
October 22 when his “Koranic
Instruction” (1890), in which the artist
has daringly inscribed his own name on
the holy book, comes with a £3m-£5m
estimate. The work is one of 40
paintings on offer from the esteemedNajd Collection. The next day,
Dorotheum in Vienna offers Hamdi
Bey’s full-length portrait, “Dame
turque de Constantinople” (1881): it
made the artist’s previous auction
record when it sold within estimate for
£3.4m in 2008 and now seems to be
pitched low,at €1.5m-€1.8m.
There has been areassessment of so-
called “Orientalist” art, generally made
by European painters whovisitedIslamic countries andwhich has
suffered accusations of exoticising the
east. Understandably, there are still
sensitivities, but works that avoid
a patronising view are increasingly
prized, particularly by private buyers
and institutions from the Islamic
countries. Claude Piening, Sotheby’s
head of 19th-century European
paintings, says that these account for
75 per cent of its Orientalist art buyers.Tefaf New York Fall is introducing
“collaborative exhibitions” to its fourth
edition next month (November 1-5),
for which galleries from different
disciplines will show together in seven
of the Park Avenue Armory’s historic
rooms. The idea behind the mash-up is
to demonstrate “the timelessness of
design”, a spokeswoman says, and the
combination should also help pull in
the faster-moving contemporary and
Modern art crowd.
Collaborative exhibitors include the
antiquities specialist Charles Ede with
New York’s Sean Kelly contemporary
art gallery. Their pairings include a
large, Hellenistic head of a man (2nd
century- 1st century BC) with MarinaAbramovic’s “Portrait with Golden
Mask” (2009). “The intention is to
show that all are part of one great
continuum,” says Martin Clist,
managing director at Charles Ede.Sotheby’s Modern and contemporary
African art auction on October 15 made
a total £3.2m (£4m with fees), above
its £1.9m-£2.8m estimate. This was
flattered by the late Nigerian artist Ben
Enwonwu (1917-94) who had 11 works
in the 103-lot sale and whose striking
painting “Christine” (1971) sold for six
times its high estimate for £900,000
(£1.1m with fees). The unnamed buyer
— on the phone to head of department
Hannah O’Leary — also bought
Enwonwu’s “Africa Dances” (1970) for
£380,000 (£471,000 with fees, est
£150,000-£200,000).
Overall, the afternoon sale belonged
to the well-represented west African
artists. Also selling above estimate,
albeit at much lower price levels than
their Modern counterparts, were
Dominique Zinkpè (Benin, b1969)
whose “Les Villagois” sold for £10,000
(£12,500 with fees, est £7,000-£9,000)
and the Ivorian, Abdoulaye AboudiaDiarrassouba (known as Aboudia,
b1983), whose four works in the sale all
sold well (up to £30,000, with fees).
African art might seem to be
booming, but total auction sales are
still relatively low and have been falling
in value since a 2017 peak of $55.7m,
according to ArtTactic — although
Sotheby’s sales have bucked this trend.Phillips is to auction a painting by the
American illustrator Norman Rockwell
that mightmake you wince. “Before
the Shot” (1958) shows a young boy in
a doctor’s surgery steeling himselffor a
vaccination. The paintinghas been on
loan to the Norman Rockwell Museum
in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for 13
years. Rockwell normally features in
auctions dedicated to American art but
Phillips feels the artist deserves to
graduate to its New York evening sale
of the most sought-after 20th-century
and contemporary artists (estimate
$2.5m-$4.5m, November 14). The
auction house isn’t naming the seller of
the work but says it has had only two
private owners, the first — as a gift
from Rockwell — was the doctor who
features in the painting.Late in the year, sales get an injection of energy
The Art Market |Fairs change hands; spotlight on Hamdi Bey; mash-ups at Tefaf New York; Ben Enwonwu lights up Sotheby’s; Rockwell’s vaccination painting. ByMelanie Gerlis
new loose facture, using thick hog’s hair
brushes. It was unpopular; salesfell.
Freud’s human project of individual re-
presentation was anathema to pop and
op artists. “I can’t see the point of it, why
you do it,” Richard Hamilton told him.
The two major self-portraits from this
beleaguered decade — “the idea that all
your time and conscience is being spent
doing something negligible is exhilarat-
ing,” Freud claimed — are wonderfully
defiant in their lavish posturing.
In “Interior with Plant, Reflection‘Before the Shot’ (1958) by
Norman Rockwell, on sale at PhillipsOCTOBER 19 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 10/201917/ - 16:37 User:paul.gould Page Name:WKD15, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 15, 1