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The portraits of Lucian Freud (1922\u20132011) dominated the discourse of the figurative genre of painting throughout the twentieth century, specifically in the Anglo-American realm.1<\/span><\/sup>\u00a0<\/span>As a member of the influential group of figurative artists in the 1970s, known as the School of London, Freud\u2019s life and his career ran parallel to the late abstract expressionists.<\/span><\/p>\n In partnership with the Royal Academy of Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), presented <\/span>Lucian Freud: The Self-Portraits<\/em>,<\/em> curated by Akili Tommasino, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the MFA (fig. 1). This exhibition was the first to explore Lucian Freud\u2019s self-portraits over the course of his lifetime. The exhibition opened with Freud\u2019s first self-portrait painting, <\/span>Self-Portrait<\/em> (1940), then moved through a chronology of his paintings, leading visitors in an oval towards his last self-portrait in 2002\u2019s <\/span>Self-Portrait.<\/em>\u00a0The exhibition showcases the artist\u2019s ability to reveal a broad range of human emotions through different techniques as he shifts from cool-colored, detailed works to the pink, fleshy toned paintings typically associated with his mature style\u00a0(fig. 2).<\/span><\/p>\n The chronological sections of the exhibition, which include \u201cReflections in the Studio,\u201d \u201cLate Self-Portraits,\u201d and \u201cDrawing,\u201d also trace Freud\u2019s experimentation with different media. His reputation as a magnetic philanderer receives only a quick mention in section-text panels in favor of attention to his professional practice. Instead, the curatorial approach emphasizes the artist\u2019s own fascination with changes in his interior and exterior self-image. The exhibited paintings allow for close visual comparison of his experiments in mirrors, materiality, and nudity in portraiture.<\/span><\/p>\n The exhibition points to how the thickly impastoed skin of his subjects, as seen in the 2002 oil painting <\/span>Self-Portrait, Reflection, <\/span><\/i>reveals the artist\u2019s occupation with the fragility of the aging body (fig. 3). The emphasis is on the artist\u2019s technical tour de force as revealed in his look at the sensual and the scabrous. Yet, self-portraits which trace one\u2019s physique as it morphs over decades are profoundly narcissistic and introspective. This undertones of this fascination with the self-image remains unexplored in the exhibition. Equally unaddressed is Freud\u2019s unsettling emotional relationship with his sitters, implicit in <\/span>Flora with Blue Toe Nails <\/span><\/i>(fig. 4). Here, the artist\u2019s shadow encroaches on the bed upon which a young woman reclines. The shadow, similar to the mirror, turns the canvas into a double space enclosed by two temporalities: an initial instance of the artist as producer of the scene and a second time when the artist places himself alongside the sitter as a subject of the painting.2\u00a0<\/span><\/sup><\/span>Addressing the uncanniness of this doubling would have provided a useful framework to understand the creative process of the artist in relation to his command of the medium and its materiality, as it enhances the emotional charge of the painting.<\/span><\/p>\n The mirrors hung in the \u201cSelf-Portrait Studio\u201d room encourage visitors to snap and share selfies from the exhibition, but the space fails to connect these selfies to Freud\u2019s deeper exploration of self-fashioning. Freud\u2019s paintings suggest that we should be skeptical of a consistent, internalized self-image; that we should try to apprehend ourselves the way others see us\u2014as fragments captured from different angles. The exhibition depicts the self without giving viewers much space for a deeper contemplation of the historic and present-day self-portraiture.<\/span><\/p>\n The exhibition succeeds in uncovering one of the most iconic twentieth-century Western painter\u2019s interests in materiality and aging. The MFA has pulled back the curtain to the lifestyle of an art-world celebrity, while revealing his obsession with the vulnerability of the aging human form.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span>____________________<\/span><\/p>\n Prior to entering Boston University as a PhD student in the History of Art and Architecture, Shannon Bewley was the Provenance Research Fellow in the departments of American and European Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art. Her research areas include photographs of conceptual art, modernist sculpture, and exhibitions histories. <\/span><\/p>\n Chahrazad Zahi was an independent curator before she joined the department of History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. Since 2012, she has been concerned with stimulating the publishing of art histories of the MENA region, beyond the western canon. <\/span><\/p>\n ____________________<\/span><\/p>\n 1. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, <\/span>Lucian Freud: The Self-Portraits, <\/span><\/i>exhibition<\/span> introductory section text panel.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n 2. The impossibility of representing a living subject is one of Lucian Freud\u2019s central themes, as the portrait has long been viewed as failing to capture the presence of the sitter’s subjectivity. Discussing the process of being represented, Roland Barthes writes of a sense of inauthenticity: \u201cI am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object;\u201d Roland Barthes, <\/span>Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography<\/span><\/i>, trans. Richard Howard<\/span> (London: Fontana, 1984), 14. The artist circumvents the objectification of the subject by using mirrors and de-doubling, in Barthes\u2019s terms, the subject.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Museum of Fine Arts, Boston September 13, 2019\u2013May 3, 2021 by Shannon Bewley and Chahrazad Zahi The portraits of Lucian Freud (1922\u20132011) dominated the discourse of the figurative genre of painting throughout the twentieth century, specifically in the Anglo-American realm.1\u00a0As a member of the influential group of figurative artists in the 1970s, known as the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15902,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4293"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15902"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4293"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5217,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4293\/revisions\/5217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"\/sequitur\/files\/2020\/07\/09_Self-Portrait_1974-438x636.jpg\")
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Shannon Bewley<\/span><\/h4>\n
Chahrazad Zahi<\/span><\/h4>\n
Footnotes<\/h4>\n