translated by Giorgina Arcuri

AT CHRISTIE’S THE ENGLISH ARTIST ESTABLISHES THE NEW WORLD RECORD FOR ANY LIVING ARTIST

The “Post War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale” held on 13th May at Christie’s New York passed the market test with contemporary art. During the evening the auction brought a total of 348.2 million dollars, with a 95% sale percentage, and marked new world records for Richard Prince, Sam Francis, Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon, Leon Gottlieb. However, the artist who made the public gasp in the auction house was the English painter of German origins Lucian Freud who, with the work “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” executed in 1995, marked the new world record for any living artist, stealing the title from the American Jeff Koons who on 14th November 2007 at Sotheby’s had set the record with “Hanging Heart”, sold for 23.5 million dollars.
“Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” is one of Lucian Freud’s most sought after paintings. Indeed, it is the first work of a series painted in the nineties and considered by many experts the painter’s highest artistic expression. The painting portrays a corpulent woman, lying asleep on a worn and shabby sofa; her bulky and graceless curves are mercilessly presented to the beholder in all their crudeness. 
The life-size model depicted in this stunning masterpiece is Sue Tilley, also humorously called “Big Sue”, who came into contact with Freud through an Australian performer, Leigh Bowery, and started collaborating with the painter posing altogether for four paintings.
Sue Tilley posed for over nine months before the painting was completed. Just 30 dollars a day for a painting that was sold for 33,641,000 dollars, but she had the great satisfaction of being the first naked woman to appear on the front cover of the “Financial Times”.
Whether you consider him as the nephew of the great Sigmund or as the greatest living painter, Lucian Freud remains for now a record artist for the highest price ever achieved for any living artist.
Born in Berlin in 1922, Lucian Freud sought refuge with his family in London in 1933, to escape racial persecutions in Germany, becoming British citizen in 1939. The artist has always lived in England, where he started his artistic career around the nineteen-forties. Since then Lucian Freud has been considered one of the greatest living figurative artists. In all his oeuvre, there is a pedantic observation of reality, a sometimes disturbing reality. He denudes it, he scrutinizes the human soul through portraits.
He highlights the signs of life and continues amazing for tragicalness and sensuality. The subjects chosen by Lucian Freud are nearly always relatives, friends or people close to him. The artist leaves his subjects in pose for many hours in a row. On the other hand, the time required for the realization of a piece of work is long, even several months of work before a painting can at long last meet the public’s eye. A work in progress is open to constant and unexpected modifications as the case may be and goes back to what the subject holds as the most precious thing, itself, immortalizing it in portraits of women, men and animals captured in their most fluid, genuine and ordinary bearings.
Towards his subjects, Freud has a passionate psychological dialogue, a visceral tête-à-tête, a constant crossing of glances and impressions between who sits on the easel and who instead indulges in the artist’s observation. Nothing is abstract in Freud’s art, only signs intended to translate in painting an inquiring eye that gradually becomes more intimate, deep and intent on seizing the inner secrets of people and, as Freud writes, “I describe myself and my surroundings, the people whom I care for, my rooms and what I know”.