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Lot 335 On a trip to Greece with his children, Freud took with him watercolours, a medium which he had not explored before. The resulting images are incredibly immediate and intimate portraits of his children. Head and crouching or extended bodies were depicted in subtle tones of green, tan and amber. It is telling that in 1954, some seven years earlier, Freud had abandoned drawing as a medium, feeling that the linear component of his pictures was too dominant. In the meantime, as is clear in these watercolours, he began to focus on capturing a sense of the mass of his subjects through an accumulation of colour and form on the surface. Loose, painterly, abstracted washes replaced earlier incisive linearity, and monumentality and form took the place of characterisation and detail.
Lucian Freud (b. 1922)
Head of a Child II
Closed7 February 2008
Price Realised
GBP 84,500