I thought if I got it right, I, too, could enter such a pristine state of rest. I’d assemble myself on the love seat to mimic her position, plugging my left foot snugly between the cushions. Her right hand cups her breast with serene detachment, as if it’s a pillow, while her left hand grips the sofa’s back, which seems to steady her through her dreamscape.īenefits Supervisor Sleeping, 1995 (Lucian Freud Archive)
Directly across from the maroon love seat in my father’s apartment, there hangs a framed picture of a naked, plump woman curled up and asleep on a couch. Before I knew who the artist was, I was captivated by what some consider his most famous piece.
The insight one might glean from the Norwich anecdote-Freud’s desire to capture more than just what meets the eye-was also something I sensed as a child. So I thought the best thing I can make them do to reveal themselves is naked self-portraits.” It turns out Freud got “bad receptions from one or two parents” and there were calls “to alert the police.” The idea didn’t quite pan out. Freud was notoriously impassioned (he had at least 14 children), utterly against convention, ruthless in his portrayal of self and subject, and possessed of a lifelong goal, as he put it, to “shock and amaze.” These traits were in stark contrast to his students at Norwich, in whom he saw an “innate timidity of a very agreeable kind but the antithesis, really, to the absolute cheek of making art. The episode is only briefly described at the end of William Feaver’s first volume of the artist’s biography- The Lives of Lucian Freud: The Restless Years, 1922-1968-yet it is illustrative of Freud as both person and painter. Just once.”Īccording to Lucian Freud, this is a talk he addressed to students of a life-painting course at the Norwich School of Art in 1964. Take your clothes off and paint yourself. “You’ll be dead very soon and I want you to do naked self-portraits and put in everything you feel is relevant to your life and how you think about yourself … Try and make it the most revealing, telling, and believable object … Make a visual statement and forget your inhibitions and be over the top.
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