Displaying items by tag: Lucian Freud

An important archive comprising Lucian Freud’s sketchbooks, drawings and letters has been acquired by the nation from the estate of Lucian Freud through the Acceptance in Lieu Scheme. The archive has been permanently allocated to the National Portrait Gallery, which in 2012 staged the acclaimed Lucian Freud Portraits exhibition, the Gallery’s most visited ticketed exhibition.

The National Portrait Gallery plans to make the archive, which has never been published or exhibited, accessible to the public.

A Lucian Freud drawing not seen in public for nearly 70 years has emerged having been largely unknown to experts, thought to be the only self-portrait to also feature his first wife Kitty Garman.

Freud drew the startlingly intense work, Flyda and Arvid, in 1947 and gave it shortly afterwards to his friend Sonia Brownell, best known for marrying George Orwell on his deathbed in 1949 and who was almost certainly the model for Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

An unusual, early drawing by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, has been acquired The Walker Art Gallery. It will go on public display from July 14, 2015.

The drawing, Study for Temptation of St Anthony (1909), will be on show for the first time as part of a new display at the Gallery, Picasso on Paper, which runs until October 31, 2015.

Elaine Wynn and Antony Ressler have been elected as the new board co-chairs of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, officials announced Thursday. They succeed Andrew Brandon-Gordon and Terry Semel, who will remain on the museum board with the title co-chairs emeriti.

Wynn joined LACMA's board of trustees in 2011 and is an active art collector. She was the reported buyer in 2013 of the $142.4 million Francis Bacon triptych painting of Lucian Freud — then a record sum for a painting sold at auction. 

Lucian Freud's most famous and iconic subject will be offered as the highlight of Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary sale on May 13. "Benefits Supervisor Resting" is regarded as Freud’s ultimate tour de force, a life-size masterwork in the grand historical tradition of the female nude, painted obsessively with intense scrutiny and abiding truth.

This bold and extraordinary example of the stark power of Lucian Freud’s realism reveals his unique ability to capture the reality of the human form in all its natural force. Chosen by Freud as the cover of the definitive monograph about the artist, "Benefits Supervisor Resting" was included by the artist in every major museum exhibition devoted to Freud, including Tate Britain, London, The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the recent survey "The Facts and the Truth: Lucian Freud at the National Portrait Gallery, London."

Lucian Freud’s treasured collection of paintings and drawings by his friend Frank Auerbach is to be distributed to galleries across the UK in lieu of around £16m in inheritance tax, it has been announced.

The 40 paintings and drawings were offered to the nation after Freud’s death in 2011, representing the largest ever single agreement under the acceptance in lieu (AIL) scheme.

On Monday Arts Council England, which administers the scheme, announced that every part of the UK would benefit, with galleries in cities including Belfast, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Newcastle all set to be get Auerbachs.

A logjam of giant names in the arts comes together in one small canvas to be auctioned next month: Lucian Freud, painted by Francis Bacon, and owned by the late Roald Dahl.

Dahl died in 1990, Bacon in 1992, and Freud in 2011. Although they later fell out, the young Bacon and Freud were close friends, who painted one another's portraits – and Dahl was a great admirer and friend of Bacon's.

The renowned children's author bought this Study for Head of Lucian Freud in 1967, the year it was painted, for £2,850 with the proceeds from one of his most famous books, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It will be sold next month at Christie's estimated at up to £12m.

This past November, Francis Bacon’s triptych portrait Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) sold for $142.4 million at Christie’s, setting an artist’s record and becoming the most expensive work ever sold at auction. Less than a month later, the massive contemporary masterpiece turned up on loan, not at a modern-day art mecca like New York’s Museum of Modern Art (as Edvard Munch’s The Scream did), but on the opposite end of the US, at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. The painting, which remained on view there through early April, was loaned by its new owner Elaine Wynn, ex-wife of casino mogul and top collector Steve Wynn. Mrs. Wynn, a resident of Nevada, was reportedly entitled to save more than $10 million in taxes by first parking the painting at the Portland Art Museum before bringing it to her home state.