Lucian Freud

When asked if he was a good model for himself, Lucian Freud responded: “No, I don’t accept the information that I get when I look at myself, that’s where the trouble starts.” It is precisely that “trouble”, however, that makes the artist’s self-portraits so compelling: each portrait portrays a different perspective on the artist, as he confronts his own mortality.

Freud’s extraordinary self-portraits are celebrated in a new exhibition at London’s Royal Academy: 'Lucian Freud: The Self-portraits' features more than fifty paintings, prints and drawings that see the “modern master of British art turn his unflinching eye firmly on himself.” Among them is 'Self-Portrait' (1974), a powerful graphite and watercolor study, on loan from the UBS Art Collection, which sees Freud portray himself in complex layers of color.

First begun in 1939, Freud’s self-portraits are also markers for his artistic development. Few artists of the 20^th century have turned to themselves as subject with such regularity, and each work reflects the fascinating evolution of his practice – from the graphic works of his early career, to the fleshy impasto that characterized his later output. Together, they span seven decades, with the last painted in 2003 – less than a decade before his death aged eighty-eight.

“The UBS Art Collection, now in its sixth decade of active collecting, has many treasures and notable pockets of depth, including fifty-four works by the acclaimed artist Lucian Freud,” comments Mary Rozell, Global Head of the UBS Art Collection. Rozell praises the “layered dimensions” of Freud’s subject matter; his are works that “command our close attention and thought,” asking viewers to adopt the artist’s meticulous lens.

The complexity of Freud’s self-portraits is a reflection of his process: though his medium shifted during his career, he maintained a forensic approach, insisting “the longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.” In 2007, Freud began a portrait that took sixteen months to complete – requiring his sitter, the art handler Ria Kirby, to lie motionless in his studio seven nights a week. In the 1970s, he spent four-thousand hours on a series of paintings depicting his mother.

Freud’s works capture flesh, wrinkles, hair and veins. In the faces of those he paints, there is youthful ambition and energy, middle-aged contemplation, and the vulnerability of old age. Though he was notoriously elusive – except to sitters, who fondly recall his anecdotes and impersonations – Freud’s portraits offer a glimpse into the mind of one of Britain’s great artists, whose staggering body of work had a shaping impact on the development of 20^th century British art.

Lucian Freud, 'Self-Portrait' (1974) watercolour on paper 34.8 x 25.2 cm © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images. UBS Art Collection. This work has featured in several exhibitions including 'Lucian Freud: Closer, Etchings from the UBS Art Collection', presented at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin in 2017 with an accompanying catalogue published by Hatje Cantz, and 'Lucian Freud: A Closer Look', at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark in 2015.