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Iain Baxter&
Sunday 3 June 2012
Lucian Freud, Boy on a Sofa 1944, Pencil, charcoal & chalk on paper, 15 x 17"
...A masterful drawing like “Boy on a Sofa” (1944), rendered in pencil, charcoal and chalk, is nothing more than a crisply defined depiction of a teenager with a scarf tied around his neck. Yet the blacks, whites and grays sing with perfect clarity against the blue field, and the strokes of shading that roam around the weave of the paper create a swirling counterpoint to the solidity of the volumes.
“Boy on a Sofa” displays none of the gravity-oppressed world-weariness of Freud’s late paintings. It has an innocence only slightly tinged by adversity, as evidenced in the tightness of the boy’s forehead and eyelids. Viewed against the Freud oeuvre, it could be easily dismissed as naïve: the juvenilia of a world-renowned naysayer.
But unlike most of the artist’s work, its shock value — delivered not by its content but by its freshness and invention — is the kind that doesn’t wear off.
Lucian Freud Drawings continues at Acquavella Galleries (18 East 79th Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through June 9, 2012.
Thomas Micchelli:
ReplyDelete...A masterful drawing like “Boy on a Sofa” (1944), rendered in pencil, charcoal and chalk, is nothing more than a crisply defined depiction of a teenager with a scarf tied around his neck. Yet the blacks, whites and grays sing with perfect clarity against the blue field, and the strokes of shading that roam around the weave of the paper create a swirling counterpoint to the solidity of the volumes.
“Boy on a Sofa” displays none of the gravity-oppressed world-weariness of Freud’s late paintings. It has an innocence only slightly tinged by adversity, as evidenced in the tightness of the boy’s forehead and eyelids. Viewed against the Freud oeuvre, it could be easily dismissed as naïve: the juvenilia of a world-renowned naysayer.
But unlike most of the artist’s work, its shock value — delivered not by its content but by its freshness and invention — is the kind that doesn’t wear off.
Lucian Freud Drawings continues at Acquavella Galleries (18 East 79th Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through June 9, 2012.