Lucian Freud and Jack B Yeats

At the end of June I was at the launch of Life Above Everything: Lucian Freud & Jack B Yeats at the Irish Museum of Modern Art Freud Centre. A large amound of Freud's works are collected together in the Garden Galleries (a separate buillding) as The Freud Centre, for a period of five years. Different curators deal with the collection in different ways and I have seen several iterations of vision for this work. I was immensely curious how the work of two painters, who I think of as polar opposites, was going to be brought together coherently. Below is Girl with Roses by Lucian Freud (left) and Portrait Figure of an Irish Gentleman by Jack B Yeats (right). It was interesting to learn that the catalyst for the exhibition was the fact that Freud had a Yeats drawing by his bedside for 20 years and had advised a friend-collector on Yeats works to buy! I enjoyed seeing many Yeats works that I had never seen before, and to see the Freud works in a different context. The highlight of the night, for me, however, was the poetry reading by Freud's daughter, Annie, whose poetic works showed facility and humour.

I was pleased several weeks later, when meeting friends at the National Gallery of Ireland, to view works of Freud and Yeats amongst other modernist works. While I had seen all the Yeats works on display at NGI on previous visits, I had a fresher point of view after having seen the exhibition at IMMA's Freud Centre.

I had never seen, or noticed, this early Freud painting at the NGI before and was quite intrigued by its mystery and expressive painting style, which is so different from his later works.

Lucian Freud

In 2016 the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) opened the Lucian Freud Project, dedicating the whole of the Garden Galleries (a small building) to the work of Lucian Freud for the following five years. I had seen that exhibition, which included paintings, works on paper, and prints along with copper plates that he printed. It was great to see so much of Freud's work in one place, but I wondered how IMMA planned to keep this exhibition fresh over the extended period.

Interestingly and intriguingly, IMMA decided to invite guests in to curate exhibitions around the specific collection that was on loan. The first of these exhibitions opened in mid-February; "The Ethics of Scrutiny" was curated by artist Daphne Wright. I went to the exhibition two weeks ago, totally curious as to how curation was going to change the exhibition. It was fantastic! 

 The first small gallery was a pleasant portent of things to come: dimly lit and reverent, on one wall there were some watercolour botanical drawings by Sigmund Freud (Lucian Freud's grandfather) and in the middle of the room a horizontal display case containing a number of reproductions of Emily Dickenson's "envelope poems". On a further wall was a small painting of Freud's that scrutinised the us, the audience, daring us to look closer. Each room that followed was a sparse but intense exploration of the curatorial theme. Wright made this a multi-media exploration with lightbox reproductions of Gwen John paintings and the sound of exhibition hub-bub in one room, and a reading from a short story in another. I especially was interested in Wright's subversion of what is normally thought of as a "male gaze" as she included artwork and writing by women.

In the large basement gallery, there were a lot of Freud's paintings for individual examination and two video monitors taking centre stage in the room. The videos were clips of John Berger in Ways of Seeing, his 1970s BBC series. In the clips he was analysing the historical view of the female nude.

In several rooms upstairs, Wright again juxtaposed work by other artists with key Freud works relevant to the theme of scrutiny. I loved seeing Kathy Prendergast's bronze sculpture Little Bouquet (2007), a piece of family history & memory, and also seeing a plant on the window ledge whose didactic informed that it was grown from a cutting of a plant belonging to Sigmund Freud. There was an audio of plant biologist Ottoline Leyser discussing plant intelligence.

In the final room there was a sculptural work by Thomas Schutte (which could be seen as portaits of an artist) and Freud's moving self-portrait. Doubly moving was the sound of Bernie Brennan singing the Nine Inch Nails' song Hurt, much in the style of the legendary Johnny Cash's brilliant cover of this song.

Lucian Freud Project at IMMA

I went to the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) recently to see the Lucian Freud work, which will be exhibited in the Garden Galleries for the next five years. While at the moment all the work is being exhibited as a large collection, I got the impression that over this period that the work may be exhibited in different curatorial permutations, so now was the time to see the work before there was any personal "agenda" attached to it! This etching is Self Portrait: Reflection, 1996. 

I have to admit that I was never particularly interested in Freud's (what seemed to me) hyper realistic painting before, but there is something compelling about seeing a collection of works together. And that I have long been interested in psychoanalysis. And that there is an unmistakable psychological element in his work that definitely is reflective of the work of his grandfather. So the name becomes part of the intrigue, and part of my reason for going to the exhibition. This etching is Bella in Her Pluto T Shirt, 1995.

The basement gallery was devoted to works on paper, mostly etchings. Given my relatively recent interest in printmaking, I was delighted to find the room full of work that was unfamiliar to me. This etching is Girl with Fuzzy Hair, 2004. I thought this print was especially interesting as I thought at first the white highlights in the hair were were created manually when wiping off the plate before going to the press. However, there was another print with similarities and the display included the metal etching plate; the highlighted areas were actually burnished on the plate itself! These burnished highlights in curly hair are a major feat of burnishing brilliance!

There were quite a lot of etching portraits in this exhibition, which had incredible detail and certainly did not speak of flattery; as I said above, something about psychology and the artist's name... This etching is The New Yorker, 2006.

Although most of the basement gallery exhibition displayed images of people, there were several landscapes, which also indicate Freud's meticulous translation of observation. This gorgeously detailed etching is Painter's Garden, 2003-2004.