The National Portrait Gallery in London dedicates an important exhibition to works on paper by Lucian Freud (1922–2011), highlighting a lesser-known but fundamental aspect of his artistic practice. The exhibition, entitled Lucian Freud: From Drawing to Painting and open until May 4, it brings together around 170 works including drawings, engravings and paintings, offering an unprecedented perspective on the creative process of one of the protagonists of figurative painting of the 20th century. The sublime exhibition returns a more complete image of the artist: not only the great portraitist known to the public, but also a tireless observer who used drawing as daily tool of knowledge and construction of painting
Freud is often remembered above all for his paintings (both intense portraits, constructed through a dense and analytical pictorial material) but the London exhibition shows how the drawing has been a constant throughout his career. The project arose largely from work on the artist’s archive held at the National Portrait Gallery, acquired after his death in 2011. The archive comprises an impressive body of material: forty-eight sketchbooks, early drawings, unfinished paintings, letters and notes. A set that, according to the curator Sarah Howgateallows us to observe “the artist’s mental processes in a way that finished works do not allow”.
The works on display also include Portrait of a Young Man (1944), made in chalk and pastel, together with numerous sketchbooks and some etchings which entered the museum’s collection in 2024. Eight of these prints represent Freud’s earliest engravings acquired by the National Portrait Gallery. The exhibition also intends to correct a widespread interpretation of the artist in historiography: the idea that Freud abandoned drawing in the 1950s to dedicate himself exclusively to painting. In reality, as emerges from the notebooks and works on display, drawing continued to play a central role, albeit in a more private and experimental form. For about twenty years, Howgate notes in the catalogue, the drawing became a sort of space parallel to the paintinga daily activity carried out in study notebooks, where Freud wrote down not only images but also fragments of his own life: telephone numbers, appointments, personal notes and even betting tips.
This biographical dimension runs through much of his graphic production. The drawings record the relationships that populated the artist’s life and reveal the way in which Freud observed his subjects with an almost scientific attention. The exhibition brings drawings and paintings into dialogue, showing how the former was often an analytical tool for developing visual ideas that would then be transferred to canvas. In other cases, however, the process was reversed: some drawings were born from paintings already made, as in the case of the studies following the Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau) (1981–83), which testify to Freud’s comparison with the European pictorial tradition.
The recordings of recent years also occupy an important place in the exhibition itinerary. Freud declared several times that he wanted to conceive them as autonomous works, capable of “functioning like paintings”. In them we find the same observational intensity of his pictorial portraits, however translated into a linear and incisive language. The exhibition path also reflects the artist’s stylistic evolution: from linear precision of the first works to the progressive opening towards a freer and more pictorial sign that characterizes the pencil and charcoal drawings of the Seventies.
The new exhibition confirms the persistence of institutional interest in Freud. In recent years London has dedicated numerous exhibitions to the artist, including Lucian Freud: New Perspectives alla National Gallery e Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits at the Garden Museum in 2022. Despite this frequency, attention to his work does not seem to be waning. The reason is probably linked to the very nature of his painting: a constant investigation into the body, observation and physical presence of the subject. In this context, drawing appears as the original place of that research.
