The next painter is another one I’ve not featured on my blog yet. Lucian Freud passed away back in 2011 so he’s another dead artist/painter and we’re going back to his 50’s today. This tale does also go up to the present date as unsolved famous missing painting story. Collecting here in my little online gallery post is everything that I know of Freud painting/drawing of Bacon. Minus one printmaking which is the black & white cooper plate/print of the same as the feature image portrait above which you can still find that print in the Tate in the U.K. Off course, I’ve feature a couple of Francis own paintings posts here and here are those links. Bacon did more than a few paintings of Freud so I might have to blog those sometime soon.
Below: the very top painting from the late 50’s is really a work in process that was never finish, you see the charcoal lines drawn on the canvas. It’s been well documented he started his painting with charcoal drawing onto the canvas, then applied his paint to an area of the canvas then gradually worked outward from around about the middle. It’s left unfinished after Bacon stopped sitting for him. Here’s the two ways these painters worked: Bacon painted almost everything from photos he would take himself and sometime by others but Freud always painted from life or the model sitting right in front of him. Unfinished or not I think, it sold last year for well over five million pounds. Two drawings from the very early 50’s is next, his face has a little more detail drawn into it but it’s are two very simple line drawings so almost the opposite to his paintings. Freud did hated and loathed color photo reproduction of his paintings so I’m going against his wishes. To some-up very quickly here his view was cameras couldn’t take his painted colors right which I guess, is a fair call if you liked that idea.
Three down is or was his most well-know portrait of FB which is oil on canvas and only complete portrait painted in 1952. Cut-to: in Berlin, Germany art gallery in May 1988 in middle of the day or broad daylight it was stole to never to been seen since. Well, someone is got it but it’s a total mystery who? It was even screw down to the wall, it’s a very small painting/portrait at only 7-by-5-inch’s with no CCTV back then but a camera crew who had taken videotape recording filmed it on the same morning and you could see it still hung on the wall but in-between somewhere, somehow, someone unscrewed the small painting/portrait and just walked out the front door with it. The art gallery staff and security total missed it but was a very busy show. Around mid-afternoon a group of students walked in then notice the painting/portrait was missing but no one knew anything?
Cut-to: 2001 Lucian himself got 2500 wanted poster printed with reward money no questions asked payed by him. Five down is that poster, it’s written Germany and was stuck-up around Berlin the city it was stole from. Freud always consisted it was nicked by a local in the know and still somewhere in that city. Somehow I think he was very wrong, if you research anything about the underground black market of famous stole paintings, his Bacon portrait most likely wasn’t even in that country by the time when finally the alarm bells was rises. Berlin was the very last stop on Freud’s first ever world traveling exhibition which the show had already been to the cites of Washington DC, London and Paris. Last change for it to be stolen but more likely it was the easiest place to steal it from? No one seem the notices for what could have been more than a few hours too. If you’ve never check out how many well-known or even famous paintings are missing you’ll be very surprised! Maybe, I should blog post some more of them here? His wanted poster now have become a collector’s items themselves too! BTW both Freud and Bacon had a big falling out with each other which I might just have to blog something about that a little more sometime soon?
A lot of it seem to happen in 1988 because today’s song is (I Feel Like A) Francis Bacon Painting by Honolulu Mountain Daffodils who were a English band and did appears on the album Tequila Dementia of 1988.
Cheers 🙂
a1000mistakes 