Woman Sleeping, 1995, Lucian Freud, Etching on paper
Tate: Presented anonymously 1997. Photo © Tate, London 2016. Artwork © Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Copyright Service
Transcript
[piano music with contemporary electronic undertones]
Female Narrator The woman seen here sleeping is Sue Tilley. She was one of Lucian Freud's favorite subjects. Getty Curator Julian Brooks.
Julian Brooks He was absolutely captivated by her size, her sensuality. And he portrayed her, again and again, in paintings and in etchings, and was just fascinated by the flesh.
The extraordinary thing with the etching is you have no sense of context. He makes us concentrate on her body by not putting anything in the background.
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Female Narrator Freud's approach to etching was unconventional.
Julian Brooks He insisted that the model was sitting there in front of him while he worked on the etching plate. And nobody, as far as I know, has done that before. And he just works on it and works on it. And the sitter has to just bear with it and be there for, literally, hours and days and months. By spending that amount of time, he felt he could get to another level of rendering the sitter.
[piano music with contemporary electronic undertones]
Female Narrator The thick outline around Tilley's body records the passage of time. Though it's possible to burnish out or erase the lines of an etching, Freud instead added lines on top of one another.
Freud's demanding work methods sometimes wore out his models. Especially Sue Tilley, who worked in a local unemployment office by day...and by night, went out with her best friend and another Freud model, Leigh Bowery.
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Julian Brooks And they were out all night at night clubs, drinking and celebrating and dancing and living it up and they would then come back and frankly, need to sleep [chuckles]. And often, Freud wanted them at his studio at eight in the morning, or nine in the morning. And so both Sue Tilley and Bowery would go and sit for him and they would literally just sleep.