All posts tagged: Freud

A Lucien Freud Nude is Poised to Break Auction Records at Sotheby’s

A Lucien Freud Nude is Poised to Break Auction Records at Sotheby’s

Published by Jenni Sidey

The subject of an auction-bound Lucian Freud nude portrait may be asleep, but the painter’s market is wide awake and keenly watching the rare lot. Titled Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, the painting could fetch between £25 million and £35 million ($33.4 million to $46.8 million) when it hits the block on June 24 at Sotheby’s in London—to the astonishment of its subject, Sussex resident Sue Tilley. The model and frequent Freud muse told BBC Radio Sussex that she was “flummoxed” by the market fervor. “I can’t quite believe it’s happening,” she said. Related Articles According to Tilley, she met Freud “by luck” in 1993 through a mutual acquaintance, the fashion designer and performance artist Leigh Bowery, one of Freud’s most celebrated sitters, who had already appeared in a series of striking nude portraits—thickly painted studies of dimpled, mottled flesh flowing over bone. Freud held famously unhurried sessions, often requiring sitters to spend unbroken hours in the studio over the course of days or even months. As a result, many subjects were depicted reclining or …

Lucian Freud Spent Years Denying This Painting Was His. Now It’s Heading to a Museum

Lucian Freud Spent Years Denying This Painting Was His. Now It’s Heading to a Museum

Published by Jenni Sidey

A portrait Lucian Freud spent years insisting was not his will go on public display for the first time this summer after researchers uncovered evidence that appears to prove he painted it after all. The work, Man in a Black Scarf, will be shown in “Benton End: A Paradise of Pollen and Paint” at London’s Garden Museum, according to The Guardian. Freud painted the portrait in 1939 while studying at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Hadleigh, Suffolk. The sitter is believed to be John Jameson, heir to the Jameson whiskey family.  Related Articles The painting’s journey to a museum wall has taken nearly four decades. In 1985, Christie’s cataloged the work as a Freud. Then Freud said it wasn’t, and the auction house changed its mind. He continued to deny the painting throughout his life.  Part of the dispute appears to have had less to do with paint and canvas than old grudges. According to Jon Lys Turner, who inherited the work, Freud had a falling out with Denis Wirth-Miller and Richard Chopping, fellow students at …

‘Big girls can do well’ says Lucian Freud muse as portrait could fetch £35m

‘Big girls can do well’ says Lucian Freud muse as portrait could fetch £35m

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Lucian Freud’s final painting in his series depicting benefits supervisor Sue Tilley is estimated to fetch up to £35m at auction – although the subject admits that she has “never got any money” herself. Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, which was painted from 1995 to 1996, will go up for sale at Sotheby’s for the first time in June. It has been hailed as one of the late artist’s defining masterpieces, with art critic and historian Martin Gayford calling it “the most important [work] that Freud has ever painted”. The painting depicts Tilley as she’s slouched on a leather sofa fully naked, with the subject sitting for Freud, who died aged 88 in 2011, three times a week over nine months. Speaking about how the painting is worth up to £35m, an amused Tilley told BBC Radio 4’s Today: “I’ve worked …

Ellie Bamber on playing Kate Moss in Moss & Freud: ‘The fear set in very quickly’

Ellie Bamber on playing Kate Moss in Moss & Freud: ‘The fear set in very quickly’

Published by Sam Flores

If the preparation sounds extreme, the film gives Bamber little room to hide. Moss & Freud is a fashion film but only in flashes: the Corinne Day feathered-headdress shoot on the beach for The Face, Moss eating a Magnum topless on a Vivienne Westwood catwalk, and other moments of fashion folklore. Bella Freud, the fashion designer (and one of Freud’s 14 officially acknowledged children) played exceptionally by Jasmine Blackborow, is a constant presence, having introduced the model to her father, Lucian. Other memories are more uncomfortable, including a flashback to Moss vulnerable at 17, posing with Mark Wahlberg for Calvin Klein. Mostly, though, it is about the sometimes charming, sometimes challenging relationship the then 28-year-old model developed with the 80-year-old painter, famous for his refusal to flatter his subjects. Source link

The Feminine as Structural Problem

The Feminine as Structural Problem

Published by Jenni Sidey

Twelve years ago, I committed to a life in philosophy—knowing it meant poverty and prolonged adolescence. Years of it. Maybe forever, given the job market’s generosity toward philosophers! And my commitment hasn’t wavered. How could it? Philosophy does something almost nothing else can: whether I’m reading, writing, teaching, or lost in dialogue, it lifts me beyond the bounds of identity—beyond being a grad student with no real job, Iranian, cisgender, immigrant, daughter, sister—beyond every label pinned to me. But not in an erasing way; I am still each of them, yet for a moment, I become something more.   What strikes me about my ongoing commitment to philosophy is that the deeper I go, the more feminist I become! Yet my experience of academic philosophy has largely disclosed the opposite: a discipline that solemnly declares its devotion to openness proves curiously unsettled by me as a woman—and, more precisely, by my perceived femininity. This discomfort is not a private or isolated experience unique to me; rather, the incompatibility of femininity with intellect appears to be deeply embedded in …

The Only Cure by Mark Solms review – has modern neuroscience proved Freud right? | Books

The Only Cure by Mark Solms review – has modern neuroscience proved Freud right? | Books

Published by Sam Flores

Vladimir Nabokov notoriously dismissed the “vulgar, shabby, and fundamentally medieval world” of the ideas of Sigmund Freud, whom he called “the Viennese witch doctor”. His negative judgment has been shared by many in the near 90 years since Freud’s death. A reputational high-water mark in the postwar period was followed by a collapse, at least in scientific circles, but there are signs of newfound respectability for his ideas, including among those who once rejected him outright. Mark Solms’s latest book, a wide-ranging and engrossing defence of Freud as a scientist and a healer, is a striking contribution to the re-evaluation of a thinker whom WH Auden described as “no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion”. It would be difficult to improve on Solms’s credentials for the task he sets himself. He is a neuroscientist, expert in the neuropsychology of dreams, the author of several books on the relationship between brain and consciousness, a practising psychoanalyst and the editor of the 24-volume revised standard edition of Freud’s complete works. He is also a …