Friends and Relations.

About

Taking as its inspiration a famous John Deakin photograph of the four painters in Soho in 1963 (along with much younger painter Timothy Behrens, the subject of a portrait by Freud that is on view), the exhibition elucidates the connections between their respective practices, and also features some of the artists’ portraits of each other.

Curated by art historian Richard Calvocoressi, Friends and Relations contextualizes key works by four era-defining artists. Featuring more than forty paintings from private and public collections, it positions Freud—in the centenary year of his birth—as the grouping’s central figure. Each painter was aware of the others’ practices, to the extent of occasionally competing with one another, but of the four, Freud alone collected his friends’ work. At various times throughout his life, he owned paintings by Bacon. At his death, he owned sixteen by Auerbach and one small oil by Andrews. The exhibition includes two portraits by Auerbach formerly in Freud’s collection, on loan from British museums.

Portraiture was at the heart of Freud’s, Bacon’s, Auerbach’s, and, less directly, Andrews’s practices. The exhibition’s title echoes not only the four artists’ camaraderie and interrelationships, but also the intimate relationships between artist and sitter, including artist and lover, partner, and offspring. Girl in a Dark Jacket (1947) exemplifies Freud’s crisp, early style and depicts Kitty Garman, his first wife and the daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein and Kathleen Garman; Naked Portrait on a Red Sofa (1989–91), praised by his friend, photographer Bruce Bernard, as “one of Freud’s most audacious and sensitive works,” shows the reclining figure of the artist’s daughter, Bella. The Painter’s Mother Resting III (1977) is an early entry in a series of portraits of the artist’s mother, Lucie Freud, which he began after the death of his father, Ernst Freud, in 1970.

The intense friendship between Freud and Bacon is commemorated in the latter’s Three Studies for Portraits: Isabel Rawsthorne, Lucian Freud and J.H. (1966), in which Freud’s head is paired with those of John Hewitt, a dealer in antiquities and ethnographic art, and Rawsthorne, a close friend and fellow artist whom Bacon represented in many other paintings. Another highlight is Portrait of a Man Walking Down Steps (1972), a tribute by Bacon to his lover George Dyer, who committed suicide the previous year, the day before the opening of the artist’s 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais, Paris.