Lucian Freud: The Pitiless Eye
Jenny Uglow writes: ‘At the National Portrait Gallery in London, not far from the ticket hall, there is a small bay for free temporary exhibitions. It can take you by surprise as you pass it in the corridor. This summer, as you walk toward it, an uncanny sight faces you—the head of a man emerging from a white cocoon, like a figure in a shroud. But the face is far from dead. In fact it is ferociously alive: it is an unfinished self-portrait by Lucian Freud. The white sheet through which his head pokes is the canvas itself and the unnerving oval form of the emerging face is a result of Freud’s practice of beginning a portrait by focusing on a central feature—nose, mouth, forehead, a shadow on the brow—and working very slowly outward. You can see this in his incomplete portrait of Francis Bacon of 1957, abandoned when Bacon set off abroad. The self-portrait here, probably
from the mid-1980s and never shown in public before, does resemble Freud’s famous “Reflection (Self Portrait) (1985),” but its uncanny strength gives it far more impact than you would expect from any preparatory sketch.’
