Now open at Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill gallery in London, Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews presents some of the artists’ portraits of each other to shine a light on connections between the artistic practices of these four era-defining artists.
Taking as its inspiration a famous John Deakin photograph from 1963 that shows the four painters in Soho, the exhibition – which features forty paintings from private and public collections – positions Freud as the central figure in his centenary year. Each painter was aware of the others’ practice, to the extent of occasionally competing with one another, but of the four, Freud alone collected his friends’ work.
Portraiture was at the heart of Freud’s, Bacon’s, Auerbach’s, and, less directly, Andrews’s practices, and the exhibition’s title echoes not only the four artists’ camaraderie, but also intimate relationships between artist and sitter, which here includes 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 Bacon’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, an antiquities dealer, and Rawsthorne, a close friend and fellow artist whom Bacon painted many times. Another highlight is Portrait of a Man Walking Down Steps (1972), a tribute by Bacon to his lover George Dyer, who committed suicide the year prior, the day before the opening of the artist’s 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais, Paris.
A selection of Auerbach’s work includes E.O.W., S.A.W. and J.J.W. in the Garden I (1963), a full-length portrait of his lover and frequent model, Stella West, and her family outdoors. Also included is Head of Gerda Boehm (1964), which depicts Auerbach’s cousin, who was, like him, a refugee from Nazi Germany. On loan from the Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, in Norwich, the work epitomizes Auerbach’s approach during this era.
Michael Andrews’s ambitious group portrait The Colony Room I (1962) is on loan from Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. Set in Soho’s storied drinking club, it pictures Andrews’s own mural in the background, with figures of Freud, Bacon, Bruce Bernard, artist’s model Henrietta Moraes, and the club’s proprietor, Muriel Belcher. Melanie and Me Swimming (1978–79), loaned to the exhibition by the Tate, depicts the artist teaching his daughter to swim in a river in Scotland.
Also on view at Grosvenor Hill is a selection of photographs of the four artists by their friend, the distinguished picture editor, writer, and photographer, Bruce Bernard (1928–2000). Complementing the paintings in Friends and Relations, Bernard’s portraits of the artists in their studios—some of which are exhibited publicly for the first time—are both direct and informal.
Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews and Bruce Bernard: Portraits of Friends are now open at Gagosian, 20 Grosvenor Hill, London until 28 January 2023.
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Image: Friends and Relations: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, installation view, 2022
© The estate of Michael Andrews / Tate; © Frank Auerbach, Courtesy Geoffrey Parton; © The estate of Michael Andrews/Tate; © Estate of Francis Bacon. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2022
Photo: Lucy Dawkins
Courtesy Gagosian