"For every Lucian Freud, who used to give his models regular breaks and offer them oysters and lobster, there is a Pablo Picasso who..."

"... if he didn’t bed the model in question — didn’t have much care for their wellbeing.... In Florence...  there is a growing debate about the exploitative nature of the relationship between artist and model.... 'Economically, the government has abandoned us,' Antonella Migliorini, a veteran life model at the Accademia with more than 30 years’ experience, told The Times. 'It’s as if we don’t exist.'... She said that some of the Accademia’s ten models were like athletes capable of holding complex poses with twisted torsos and arms intertwined above their heads...."

From "Florence’s life models threaten nude strike over poor working conditions/Models at the famed Accademia claim the poor pay and physicality of the job is pushing the centuries-old tradition to the brink" (London Times).

"The take of the 'feminist art historian' is that a painting of a paid model, 'a fat woman' who’s 'old' as she states, 'can only be grotesque' and is 'truly horrible.'"

"That doesn’t seem very feminist, does it? Does the self-identified feminist think Freud should only paint beautiful young models with perfect bodies instead of normal human beings? I’m so confused."

A comment on the NYT article "Lucian Freud, Stripped of Fame and Scandal/A major London exhibition asks viewers to put aside the details of the artist’s tumultuous life and concentrate on his paintings." 

"The critic Kenneth Tynan divided playwrights into two categories, 'smooth' and 'hairy,' and one could probably make a similar distinction among biographers."

"Smooth biographers offer clean narrative lines, well-underscored themes, and carrots, in the form of cliffhangers, to lure the reader onward. Their books are on best-seller lists. They’re good gifts for Dad. William Feaver, the author of 'The Lives of Lucian Freud'... exists on the opposite extreme. There’s little smoothness in him at all. His biography is hairier than a bonobo.... Lucian and his furious id would have made an interesting case study for his grandfather. The artist was amoral: violent, selfish, vindictive, lecherous.... He had at least 14 offspring he acknowledged as his own. He called himself 'one of the great absentee fathers of the age.' Soon there are grandchildren as well. Freud did not do much hugging, but his progeny could tap him for money. Many got to know him by sitting for portraits. He painted his daughters naked. 'They make it all right for me to paint them,' he said. 'My naked daughters have nothing to be ashamed of.' Freud had a mean word for everyone.... If he didn’t like you, he cut you from his life like cancer. You can always tell a monster: He wears scarves indoors."

From "The Devilish Life and Art of Lucian Freud, in Full Detail" by Dwight Garner (NYT).

The biography is a 2-volume thing, and Volume 2 just came out. In posing this question about whether you could just start with Volume 2, Garner reveals a shocking ignorance of the power of Google: 

When "Clement" suddenly appears in Volume Two, with no surname attached, will every reader know this is Clement Freud, Lucian’s estranged brother? 

Who capable of reading a big hairy biography wouldn't just google the words Lucian Freud Clement? It gets you right to a Wikipedia article on Clement Freud.

The grandson of Sigmund Freud and brother of Lucian Freud, he moved to the United Kingdom from Germany as a child.... He worked at the Nuremberg Trials and in 1947...  He married June Flewett (the inspiration for Lucy Pevensie in C. S. Lewis's children's series The Chronicles of Narnia).... Freud was one of Britain's first "celebrity chefs"... He appeared in a series of dog food advertisements (at first Chunky Meat, later Chunky Minced Morsels) in which he co-starred with a bloodhound called Henry (played by a number of dogs) which shared his trademark "hangdog" expression. 

Too much information, if anything. Bark, and Google scoops it into your bowl. Chunky Meat, later Chunky Minced Morsels indeed! Not only will every reader know this is Clement Freud, Lucian’s estranged brother. Every reader will know that the dogfood Chunky Meat was rechristened Chunky Minced Morsels.

Does it matter if the artist who's said to have painted Barack Obama's portrait had assistants who did much of the work?

Richard Johnson at Page Six writes:

Sources say artist Kehinde Wiley — who painted the former president before a background of greenery and flowers — has studios in China and produces most of his work there. "It’s his base of operation," said art critic Charlie Finch, who has known Wiley and appreciated his talent since they were students at Yale. "He has dozens of assistants working for him.... Normally, Wiley sketches out the important parts, and assistants fill out the rest."

I went there because I heard Rush Limbaugh was going on about it:

This portrait, this artist outsources portions of every painting. I mean, actual brush strokes are made by outsourced painters? And the guy admits it! He admits it! So I’m wondering who paints the sperm in this guy’s pictures. But it’s true. Obama’s picture, his portrait, was outsourced. Kehinde Wiley outsourced it. I’ve never heard of that. Is nothing real anymore? Does nobody actually do their job? Does everybody have somebody behind the scenes actually doing the work while other people are taking credit for it? It boggles my mind how often I run into this. I can’t keep of any other examples here, but it boggles my mind. Well, news anchors on TV. Somebody else is writing every word they say, and probably making one-twenty-fifth (if that much) of the salary they make.

If you don't know what "the sperm" refers to, read this. I want to talk about the practice of artists using assistants. Is it something to get worked up about or perfectly normal? I see that I missed all the discussion of this subject back in 2013 when an assistant to David Hockney died and "Suddenly Hockney's unremarkable seaside house seemed to be an art world Tardis concealing a hitherto ignored workshop of assistants, like Andy Warhol's Factory...." That's from The Guardian, which expanded on the topic:

'It was hard labour by any measure," says Jake Chapman, recalling his and brother Dinos's apprenticeship as assistants to Gilbert and George. "There was absolutely no creative input at all. They were very polite and it was interesting to hear them talking – as we did our daily penance.... We coloured in Gilbert and George's penises for eight hours a day." At least you didn't have to pay, as Rembrandt's assistants did, for the privilege of working in the master's studio. "Oh, we paid," retorts Chapman. "We paid in dignity."

The relationship between artist and artist's assistant is vexed, ripe for oedipal tensions, mutual resentments, or at least spitting in the great master's lapsang souchong. How tired, one suspects, Lucian Freud's assistant (and painter in his own right) David Dawson, got of being called "Dave the Slave" by his late master.*...

Behind every great artist might well be a highly skilled team of assistants, but that truth is suppressed for fear of shattering our illusions: the lone-genius myth helps sales, and is partly what gives an artwork its mystique.... "The idea of the genius struggling in solitude in a cockroached and frozen garret with only a crust of bread and syphilis for company is an historically specific vision no longer, if ever, of relevance," argued Stephen Bayley this week writing about Hockney's studio. "Artists are not solitary. They rely on human support systems, often of a very sophisticated sort."...

What about all those poor saps who paid Rembrandt and then wound up helping him to crank out paintings for which he got the kudos? Chapman is unsentimental: "Does the person who makes the hubcaps or whatever they're called these days – low-profile sports rims – point at a passing Mercedes SLK or whatever it's called, saying, 'I did that?' No. So why should assistants claim possession for their work? It's a job."

The work that you recognize as the work of this artist is work that is done with lots of technical help. He's the face of the operation, and if he did the whole thing himself, it would be very different work. There wouldn't be all those fussy leaves all over the background. It's like the way if the judges didn't have law clerks there wouldn't be all those citations and footnotes and reexplaining of everything over and over again. The badness would be easier to find, but is that what you want? I do, but I think a lot of people prefer slickness and glossy overproduction.

"I find cigarette packets folded up under table legs more monumental than a Henry Moore,**" [said Richard Wentworth, professor of sculpture at the Royal College of Art, who worked as Henry Moore's assistant in 1967]. "Five reasons. Firstly, the scale. Secondly, the fingertip manipulation. Thirdly, modesty of both gesture and material. Fourth, its absurdity and fifth, the fact that it works."

_____________________

* Take a moment to note the actual slave called Dave the Slave, a much-admired 19th century American potter.



** Henry Moore was huge in the 1960s, when people enthused over things like this:



IN THE COMMENTS: narayanan said:

President (you did not build that) has Portrait "painted" by Artist (I did not paint that)

Art heist in Rotterdam.

Stolen: Pablo Picasso’s 1971 “Harlequin Head”; Claude Monet’s 1901 “Waterloo Bridge, London” and “Charing Cross Bridge, London”; Henri Matisse’s 1919 “Reading Girl in White and Yellow”; Paul Gauguin’s 1898 “Girl in Front of Open Window”; Meyer de Haan’s “Self-Portrait,” around 1890, and Lucian Freud’s 2002 work “Woman with Eyes Closed.”

Marinello said the thieves have limited options available, such as seeking a ransom from the owners, the museum or the insurers. They could conceivably sell the paintings in the criminal market too, though any sale would likely be a small fraction of their potential auction value.

The problem selling these things is obviously not protection enough to keep thieves from bothering.



IN THE COMMENTS: chickelit said:

From the link: the idea that an unscrupulous private investor might have commissioned the works’ theft was far-fetched. 'That’s something that comes from Hollywood movies,' he said.

Should they blame a Hollywood video or lax security?

UPDATE: Confession of destruction.

Lucian Freud has died.

Having just blogged about a famous man's grandson, I find I must do it again. This is much sadder.

From the late 1950s, when he began using a stiffer brush and moving paint in great swaths around the canvas, Mr. Freud’s nudes took on a new fleshiness and mass. His subjects, pushed to the limit in exhausting extended sessions, day after day, dropped their defenses and opened up. The faces showed fatigue, distress, torpor.

The flesh was mottled, lumpy and, in the case of his 1990s portraits of the performance artist Leigh Bowery and the phenomenally obese civil servant Sue Tilley, shockingly abundant.

You can see that painting of Sue Tilley here, in an article from 2008 about its sale.

The naked Kate Moss painting.

I love the painter Lucien Freud, and I love his painting of Kate Moss that just sold for $7.29 million. BBC reports:

Moss first suggested she pose for Freud in an article in Dazed and Confused magazine.

Lucian Freud, grandson of famed psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, usually paints people he knows well but his most famous model, aside from Moss, is probably the Queen.

It takes between six months and a year of regular sittings for the artist to complete a painting, but Moss said she was unconcerned by the length of time it would take.

She is pregnant in the picture (which would seem to be a problem if you're posing over such a long period of time). It's nice to see the famous model displayed like a very ordinary, quite flawed, fleshy female.

The buyer of the painting is anonymous, and quite possibly Moss herself.

Anyway, I highly recommend this book of Freud's paintings. Lots of reproductions of the paintings, and the text is by Robert Hughes.