Francis Bacon’s magnetic portrait of Lucian Freud will highlight British Art: The Jubilee Auction at Sotheby’s in London on June 29. Paintined in 1964 the full-length portrait illuminates the powerful dialogue of friendship and epochal rivalry which would engulf two titans of art history and spur them to create some of their greatest works. The pair had first met 20 years earlier and would go on to share an intense friendship for over 40 years until jealousy and petty rows would ultimately splinter relations forever in the mid-1980’s.
Though their visual styles differed considerably, both artists were deeply committed to the human figure, painting each other on numerous occasions over the years. Indeed, for Bacon, Freud would become a recurrent – and one of the most significant – subjects of his work in the 1960’s. Bacon believed that: “the living quality is what you have to get. In painting a portrait, the problem is to find a technique by which you can give over all the pulsations of a person…The sitter is someone of flesh and blood and what has to be caught is their emanation.”
The black and white photographs taken by their mutual friend John Deakin would become Bacon’s primary source material as he painted Freud obsessively. Of great personal significance, Bacon would keep these photographs with him for the rest of his life, and they were rediscovered torn, crumpled and splattered with paint in his studio following his death.