Freud's Heavyweight Nude Gets $35 Million Price: Martin Gayford
Commentary by Martin Gayford May 12 (Bloomberg) -- The art world may be about to welcome a new heavyweight champion. If the estimate is correct, ``Benefits Supervisor Sleeping'' by Lucian Freud is about to become the most expensive work by a living artist to change hands at auction. The naked portrait of a very substantial public servant goes under the hammer at Christie's International in New York tomorrow evening, with the auction house expecting the 1995 work to fetch up to $35 million. That compares with the 22 million pounds ($42.87 million) that London's National Gallery paid in 2004 for Raphael's ``Madonna of the Pinks.'' That was a smaller picture of a slimmer model by one of the most admired artists of the Italian Renaissance. If the Freud makes or exceeds the estimate, it will be a double triumph for the previously underappreciated. The artist himself is now renowned, after spending much of his career out of fashion and overlooked. The 1960s was an era that Freud, now 85, looks back on, with only slight exaggeration, as ``when I was completely forgotten.'' He noticed at one point during that period that he had no income whatsoever. Freud's figurative painting, done from a living model, was considered deeply uncool in the era of pop, op and minimalist art. His work did not return to favor until the 1980s, by which time he was in his 60s. His fame did not arrive until the 1990s. One of the most impressive aspects of Freud's career is the way that he carried straight on, undeterred, year after year, working the way he wanted to work. It was an extremely arduous method, sometimes involving hundreds of hours of sittings. Now many people, and it seems the market, rank him among the greatest artists of the age. Fat is Fine That's one triumph, the other is for his subjects. At one time, Freud was accused of depicting freaks. Many of his sitters are of standard proportions and conventionally good-looking appearance (I should declare an interest here as a former Freud subject myself). But it is true neither Sue Tilley, the model for ``Benefits Supervisor Sleeping,'' nor her predecessor as Freud's main nude, Leigh Bowery, was remotely slim. In the art debate on body image, fat is fine and big can be beautiful, say Freud supporters. Tilley's 20 stone figure would have challenged such painters of the past as Rubens and Courbet, who preferred substantial models. The benefits supervisor is well beyond Rubenesque. But what's the matter with that? Prehistoric man, after all, valued just this body-type. Ugly Beautiful When asked why he painted Bowery so much, Freud once replied that he thought he looked extremely beautiful. I expect he would say the same about Tilley. He is after all an admirer of John Constable, who when a woman remarked on the ugliness of a house in an engraving, responded, ``There is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life.'' The same applies to people: that is one of the most radical aspects of Freud's art. It's now easier to see that ``Benefits Supervisor Sleeping'' is a majestic picture. Willem de Kooning once said that flesh was the reason oil painting was invented. Freud took that idea to a new level. This is one of the fleshiest, and in every sense weightiest, depictions of the human body in the whole of art. (Martin Gayford is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.) To contact the writer of this story: Martin Gayford in London at
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. Last Updated: May 11, 2008 20:29 EDT
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