Lot 185
  • 185

Lucian Freud

Estimate
300,000 - 400,000 GBP
bidding is closed

Description

  • Lucian Freud
  • Portrait of a Girl (Alexi)
  • oil and charcoal on canvas
  • 51 by 35.8 cm. 20 by 14 in.
  • Executed circa 2005.

Provenance

Arlberg Art Company, Arlberg
Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above in 2005)
Sotheby's, London, 13 February 2014, Lot 154
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Condition

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: Unexamined out of its frame, this work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals some light and unobtrusive handling marks in places along the edges. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Catalogue Note

Lucian Freud’s Portrait of a Girl (Alexi), executed circa 2005, stands as a powerful testimony to the artist’s magnificent technical ability and eloquence as a portraitist. Depicting one of the artist’s important sitters, the work captures Freud’s unrivalled mastery of paint through his signature genre: portraiture. Typically of Freud, this portrait thus becomes much more than paint on canvas - it is a probing, psychological insight into the psyche of the sitter.

Depicting a woman seen from up close, from a cropped perspective that becomes highly personal through the elimination of anything but the figure’s face, the painting powerfully captures the artist’s mastery of his medium. The sitter, Alexi Williams-Wynn, was a sculpture student at the Royal Academy of Arts when she met Freud in a chance encounter. She began sitting for him soon after they met and had a brief love affair despite a five decade age gap. Freud painted numerous portraits of Alexi during their affair, including the large-scale The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer (2004-05), that stand as enigmatic documents of the intimate relationship between artist and sitter.

In the present work, flesh is delicately rendered, with tactile and impastoed brushstrokes, in a typically Freudian approach to the human body. The feverishly expressionistic brushstrokes invite comparisons with the work of Egon Schiele, but in the present work Freud leaves much to the imagination. Focussing only on Alexi’s face and hair, these traits are rendered in paint, with the surroundings merely hinted at by charcoal-drawn lines. Where Schiele perhaps tended towards the erotic, Freud strove to capture the humanity of his subjects in a deeper psychological configuration.

Freud’s variation in colour and tone, made even more evident here by the contrast with the bare canvas which forms the background of the portrait, is typical of his mature style. There is a thoughtfulness to the artist’s technique, the face built up from a focus upon a central feature; its incompleteness indicative of this practice. This is notable in two other important paintings by the artist: a portrait of Francis Bacon from 1957, and his Self-Portrait of 1985.

An incredibly articulate and tactile example of Freud’s intuitive handling of paint, Portrait of a Girl (Alexi) is a record of the tenderness of the artist’s approach towards rendering the human psyche. A powerful document of his sitter’s being and physicality, born from an intimate relationship, this work is a striking example of Lucian Freud at his most observant.