Lucian Freud: A Closer Look [Hardcover]

This catalogue focuses on the artist’s graphic production from the period after 1982 with works from the UBS Art Collection. Freud’s (1922–2011) portraits—often of the same subjects he painted—manage to encompass his own psyche, the models’ responses and our own reactions. My work, he said, is purely autobiographical. It is about myself and my surroundings. In an etching, the subject is scored into a metal plate covered with a wax mixture, which, after immersion in an acid bath, exposes the scorings, which are left as black lines in the finished print. Readers get even closer access to this involved and nontraditional printmaking process, as the volume is supplemented with ten stages of a print from a private collection in England.