Lucian Freud: The Painter's Etchings

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Lucian Freud (British [born Germany], 1922–2011). Kai, 1991–92. Etching; plate: 27 1/2 x 21 5/8 in. (69.9 x 54.9 cm), sheet: 31 1/8 x 25 in. (79.1 x 63.5 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of William S. Lieberman, 2005 (2007.49.590) Born in Berlin, Freud was the son of a German Jewish mother, Lucie (née Brasch), and an Austrian Jewish father, Ernst L. Freud, an architect. He was a grandson of Sigmund Freud, and elder brother of the broadcaster, writer and politician Clement Freud (thus uncle of Emma and Matthew Freud) and the younger brother of Stephan Gabriel Freud.

Bella (1987), a portrait of his daughter, is defined by dense hatching, marking the head’s weight against the pillow, its wisps of hair and the face’s contours. Freud sought further contrast within the image, however. Giving the printer a proof shaded with grey wash to indicate where ink should be left on the plate after wiping, the etching was reproofed until he was satisfied. Craig Hartley describes the result as ‘seductively tonal’, one of Freud’s most beautiful portraits.2 Bella (detail) During Freud’s long career, the artist produced only a little over 70 etchings, many of which were not published, existing only as proofs, and many which were produced in editions so small that there is no possibility of any leaving the great collections to which they now belong. Their importance in Freud’s work can be illustrated by referring to the 2007 exhibition at New York’s MoMA entitled Lucian Freud: The Painter’s Etchings, which gathered together 68 of these works and showed them, with 21 related paintings, to a responsive public.

Despite a well-received first solo exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944, it was only in the 1950s that a fascination with the human flesh began to dominate Freud's work, marking the beginning of his widespread success.

Tania Sutton, a director at the gallery and member of staff for over 25 years, has chosen Lucian Freud’s portrait of his daughter, Bella.Freud made his first etching in Paris the year after the war ended. He was 23. A girl he knew from art school in East Anglia was staying at the same hotel, and she gave him a small prepared copper plate to try. The process of hard-ground etching involves drawing with a needle on a plate that has been coated with a mixture of beeswax, rosin and asphalt. The lines of exposed copper become grooves once they are bathed (or ‘bitten’) in acid; when the surface is inked, it can be printed again and again. In Paris, Freud tied a sewing needle to the side of a pencil and drew a shape he called a Chelsea bun, though it could be a softened seashell, or a sunken rose. He persuaded a local chemist to sell him some nitric acid and used it to bite the plate in the sink in his room – but he didn’t have anywhere to print it. On his way to the cinema one day, he bumped into Picasso’s nephew Javier Vilató, who told him about a printer on the Quai Voltaire. The printer made an edition of four.

Lit: Roger Bevan, ‘Freud's Latest Etchings’, Print Quarterly, vol.3, Dec. 1986, pp.334–43; Robert Flynn Johnson, ‘The Later Works 1961–1987’ in Lucian Freud: Works on Paper, exh. cat., South Bank Centre 1988, p.20–1; Jane Norrie, ‘Lucian Freud: Works on Paper’, Arts Review, vol.40, 3 June 1988, p.391; Craig Hartley, ‘Freud as an Etcher’ in Lucian Freud: The Complete Etchings 1946–1991, exh. cat., Thomas Gibson Fine Art Ltd 1991, [p.7]; Craig Hartley, Lucian Freud: Acqueforti, exh. cat., Galleria Arialdo Ceribelli, Bergamo 1994, p.17, repr. p.75 Sharp, Jasper (2013). Lucian Freud (Exhibition Catalogue of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna). Prestel. ISBN 978-3-7913-5332-6It was through Bowery that Freud met Sue Tilley, a British unemployment officer, in 1990. Tilley, known as "Big Sue," posed for Freud numerous times between 1993 and 1996, and soon became one of his most recognizable subjects. Freud had planned to make a painting of Tilley, but when she arrived at his studio badly sunburnt (a violation of the artist's rule that all his subjects avoid the sun during the time they pose for him), he decided to make the etching Woman with an Arm Tattooinstead.