Curator’s Introduction: Lucien Freud – New Perspectives

Interesting online lecture from the National Gallery introducing their Lucien Freud exhibition.

I’d already seen the show a few weeks ago but this talk made me determined to see it again as I learned a lot more about what it was trying to convey. Daniel Herman, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Projects at the National Gallery took us through each section and made links to the galleries collection which I had not spotted.

My biggest takeaway was that the naked self-portrait references Michelangelo’s self-portrait in the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel where he shows himself as the skin of St Bartholomew. In the picture Freud holds a palette knife which he didn’t use as a reference to the flaying of the saint.

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