Lucian Freud (1922-2011)
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more
Lucian Freud (1922-2011)

Drawing for Naked Figure

Details
Lucian Freud (1922-2011)
Drawing for Naked Figure
ink on paper
22 ¾ x 18in. (57.7 x 45.7cm.)
Executed in 1973
Provenance
James Kirkman, London.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1983.
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. These lots have been imported from outside the EU for sale using a Temporary Import regime. Import VAT is payable (at 5%) on the Hammer price. VAT is also payable (at 20%) on the buyer’s Premium on a VAT inclusive basis. When a buyer of such a lot has registered an EU address but wishes to export the lot or complete the import into another EU country, he must advise Christie's immediately after the auction.

Lot Essay

‘The picture in order to move us must never merely remind us of life, but must acquire a life of its own, precisely in order to reflect life.’
– Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud’s Drawing for Naked Figure, is a tender rendering of Freud’s then-girlfriend Jacquetta Eliot. The outlines of Eliot’s nude body are soft, with Freud layering one next to the other to build tone and resemble the delicacy of a drypoint etching. Pen strokes are alternatively gentle and assured, capturing the talent of the artist’s draughtsmanship – the rise of a shoulder, its form rapidly corrected, the curl of toes trailing into barely-there calligraphy. The composition of Drawing for Naked Figure directly references Freud’s contemporaneous painting, Small Naked Portrait, 1973, now part of the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. For her part, Eliot described the experience of modelling for Freud as ‘fantastically intimate’ (J. Eliot, quoted in W. Feaver, Lucian Freud, New York, 2007, p. 25). In his portraits, Freud nurtured this closeness, seeking out a person’s ‘innermost being’ in his series of naked portraits (R. Lauter, ‘Thoughts on Lucian Freud’, in Lucian Freud: Naked Portraits, exh. cat., Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, 2001, p. 122). In Drawing for Naked Figure, Eliot is vulnerable yet self-possessed, her form alluring, seductive, and insistent.

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