A massive bust of late, great British painter Lucian Freud has been created by daughter to be exhibited at the Sigmund Freud Museum
Lucian Freud’s daughter has created a giant clay sculpture of his head based on sketches made in the final months of his life. Once fired, the piece is set to be exhibited at Sigmund Freud museum in Hampstead, Lucian’s grandfather.
Jane McAdam Freud, 53, is one of Lucian’s four children that he had with the artist Katherine McAdam, but rarely saw him until her adult life. Upon making contact with her father when she was 31, McAdam Freud, by then an artist in her own right, requested that he sat for her. This he did in the final months of his life, before he died, aged 88, last July.
McAdam Freud described how ‘The last time I saw my father was shortly before his death, [was] when I finished the sketches of him’: ‘I’ve now used them to make this large portrait sculpture’. Measuring three feet by three feet by one foot, ‘It helps me to keep him alive’. Paying tribute to her father, she explained how ‘He taught me what it meant to really concentrate’, and would endeavour to follow in his footsteps. McAdam Freud currently has work at the British Museum, the V&A and the Ashmolean in Oxford, and teaches sculpture at Morley College in Lambeth.
Lucian Freud is one of the most highly regarded figurative painters of the past sixty years. Known chiefly for his thickly impasted portrait and figure paintings, he was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time. A major new exhibition of the late, great artist is set to arrive at the Royal Academy of Art in February at the National Portrait Gallery. His images of people were central to his work and this exhibition will be the first to focus on his portraiture. Insightful paintings of the artist’s lovers, friends and family, referred to by the artist as ‘people in my life’, have been selected to demonstrate the psychological drama and unrelenting observational intensity of his work.
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