Lucian Freud's Drawings Unveil the Artist's Most Intimate and Spontaneous Moments
Drawing is far more than just another medium for an artist; for a painter, it serves as the foundational process where ideas evolve and artistic identity is forged before any brush touches canvas. From Michelangelo to Picasso, drawing has long been regarded as the quickest route to accessing an artist's thought processes. However, Lucian Freud took this preoccupation to an almost pathological level, as revealed in the National Portrait Gallery's new exhibition, the largest British survey to date of his works on paper.
A Comprehensive Journey Through Freud's Artistic Evolution
This exhibition provides a fascinating and essential exploration of little-regarded aspects of one of Britain's most treasured artists. It spans from wax crayon sketches created at the age of six to highly personal late drawings, offering a unique trawl through Freud's artistic development. His early paintings, such as Self-Portrait with Hyacinths from 1947, are so dominated by sinuously suggestive lines and densely inscribed textures that they often feel like drawings with paint added as an afterthought.
Freud's family fled Berlin for Britain in 1933 when he was just 11, yet his steely focus on material details—like the tight waves of his hair or the curving petals of flowers—retains a Germanic sensibility while edging into the Surrealism fashionable at the time. Works like Quince on a Blue Table from 1943 showcase a young, experimental Freud, with quirky elements like a zebra's head craning into the canvas over a starkly painted still life.
Revelatory Sketches and Intimate Portraits
The exhibition includes cack-handed sketches from a Welsh cottage holiday with poet Stephen Spender at age 18, which bring a hint of toilet wall graffiti, and sleekly accomplished book illustrations that could pass for frames from a modern graphic novel. Even well-known early paintings, such as Girl with Roses from 1947 depicting his first wife Kitty Garman, retain a starkly outlined graphic quality, particularly in the enormous, eerily staring eyes.
Drawings of Freud's male friends, like Portrait of a Young Man from 1942, exhibit a seductive, stylised quality. However, Christian Berard from 1948 stands out as more powerful, with the French designer appearing almost miraculously real and present. Yet, Freud's typical fashion undercuts this spontaneity with minutely detailed renderings of beards and textures. His great friend Francis Bacon is captured in just a few impulsive lines, tellingly with his trousers unfastened.
Etchings and Preparatory Drawings: A Glimpse into the Process
Moving into Freud's mature work, many of the "drawings" are actually etchings—prints created by cutting into copper plates. While Freud drew directly into the plates in the presence of the sitter, these works have a carefully crafted quality intended for public exhibition. They include portraits of performance artist Leigh Bowery and benefits officer Sue Tilley, shown alongside related paintings.
More revealing are the rapidly executed preparatory drawings for paintings and etchings, which possess an intimate, unguarded quality meant only for the artist's eyes. Most moving are sketches of his mother, the subject he painted more frequently than himself. In The Painter's Mother from 1984, the folds of her jowls and carelessly swept-back hair frame her still beady eyes, making viewers feel present with Freud as he seizes an instant from eternity.
Personal Touches and Artistic Legacy
Many etchings, such as Bella from 1983, are phenomenal works in their own right, with the plate so densely scraped that his daughter's features look forged from burnished iron. More personal is a large sketch executed in brush-cleaning fluid, where three attempts to capture Bella's likeness merge messily together, offering a rare glimpse into aspects of the painting process Freud didn't intend to share.
This exhibition is filled with great things—etchings, paintings, and drawings—but it's in the latter that we are pulled deepest into the world of a man who lived his life in the full glare of public attention while remaining absolutely private at his core. Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting runs at the National Portrait Gallery from 12 February until 4 May, providing an unparalleled insight into the artist's spontaneous and personal side.
