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Lot Essay
Staring from the paper with an intense feline intelligence, the Cat's Eyes in Freud's 1946 drawing engage the viewer with a directness, even a challenge. Freud immediately tackles us in a magnetic embrace, fulfilling his assertion that, "The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable, and yet we are drawn to a great work by involuntary chemistry, like a hound getting a scent; the dog isn't free, it can't do otherwise, it gets the scent and instinct does the rest" (L. Freud, quoted in R. Hughes, "On Lucian Freud," Lucian Freud paintings, exh. cat., London, 1988, p. 19).
The mid- to late 1940s were Freud's true period of coming to age, in artistic terms. During this period, he focussed his virtuoso draughtsmanship to create images that appear paradoxically solid yet ethereal. In some of his pictures from the period there is a distinctly Surrealist flavor: in works such as Cat's Eyes, Freud harnesses the qualities of the visual world with an arresting hallucinatory intensity that becomes a revelation. It was because of this quality that, only a year after Cat's Eyes was executed, Herbert Read famously dubbed Freud the "Ingres of Existentialism." Here, using the finest and most delicate strokes, Freud has conjured the ghostly image of the cat's eyes from the bright, blank surface of the sheet. The sharp and precise manner with which Freud has summoned this vision through a hatched accumulation of calligraphic marks creates a sparkling contrast between the dark ink and the light sheet: like a moody Cheshire Cat, the eyes alone appear in the picture, the rest of the animal invisible yet deftly implied.
The mid- to late 1940s were Freud's true period of coming to age, in artistic terms. During this period, he focussed his virtuoso draughtsmanship to create images that appear paradoxically solid yet ethereal. In some of his pictures from the period there is a distinctly Surrealist flavor: in works such as Cat's Eyes, Freud harnesses the qualities of the visual world with an arresting hallucinatory intensity that becomes a revelation. It was because of this quality that, only a year after Cat's Eyes was executed, Herbert Read famously dubbed Freud the "Ingres of Existentialism." Here, using the finest and most delicate strokes, Freud has conjured the ghostly image of the cat's eyes from the bright, blank surface of the sheet. The sharp and precise manner with which Freud has summoned this vision through a hatched accumulation of calligraphic marks creates a sparkling contrast between the dark ink and the light sheet: like a moody Cheshire Cat, the eyes alone appear in the picture, the rest of the animal invisible yet deftly implied.