Lucien Freud at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

Lucien Freud at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.

Like most of the photos I took in this museum, not a very good quality of photographs again,  but I just have to live with it, as I don't know when I will be able to go to Madrid again.

I am including two photos of this painting here. This first one is taken from the internet but in my experience these get deleted after a while, so I have also included the photo I took which is unfortunately very hazy.

Reflection with Two Children (Self-Portrait), 1965

This painting combines an intense close-up of the artist, who twists his body in order to study his own reflection in a mirror at his feet on the floor, with the lamp positioned behind him, which he renders as a semi-abstract form that hovers over the painter. As John Russel states, the viewer is unable to grasp the image at first glance, as it is one of the first self-portraits in which Freud experiments with a set of two mirrors, and, as Catherine Lampert notes, we are forced to run our eyes up the figure, coming face-to-face with the artist's gaze. The idea of a mirror reflection is reinforced by the plain grey background that causes the touches of light concentrated on the face and hands to stand out even more powerfully.

The image of Rose and Ali, his children, is inspired by the tomb of the dwarf Seneb and his Family in the Cairo museum.

Seneb and his Family. You can read about this sculpture here

Large Interior, Paddington, 1968-69 (oil on canvas)

Freud's daughter Ib, wearing an expression of infinite sadness, lies semi-naked on the floor by a huge plant placed opposite a window. Freud here employs a cinematographic angle and upward perspective to depict the scene. The scene is captured from a bird's eye view. The houseplant with twisted branches is given particular prominence.

The semi-naked body of the girl on the floor is unnaturally twisted: the shoulders are parallel to the floor, while the hips and bent knees are turned partly to one side.

Freud's interest in portraying the solitude of human existence through the human body, in portraying alienated, tormented humankind, is evident here. Jean Clair noted that 'with the exception  of Picasso and Bacon, never before had the reality of the body been so harshly and so lovingly described, through the perverse means of distortion, in its beauty and its ugliness, in its stsrength and in its vulnerability, in its attraction and its repulsion, in its ceaseless and bitter search for individuality, expressed in a style which can be compared to the great styles of the past'.

Portrait of Baron H.H. Thyssen-Bornemisza, 1981-82

Portrait of the founder of the museum. The two men had a close rapport and long artistic relationship.

Man in a Chair (Portrait of Baron H.H. Thyssen-Bornemisza), 1985 (oil on canvas)