Female Narrator Lucian Freud made this painting over the course of three years. Getty Curator Julian Brooks.
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Julian Brooks Freud made a series of paintings of botanical subjects. And this is by far the largest, and greatest of all of them. The extraordinary thing is that it's made on a huge scale.
Female Narrator In the history of art, still lifes were traditionally much smaller, with the flowers or plants positioned at the center of the painting. Here Freud covers the entire canvas with the plants.
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Julian Brooks There's this wonderful sense that every single square inch of the canvas is examined and studied, showing the density of these plants. Freud himself said, 'It's like lots of little portraits of leaves,' and one really gets that sense here, that every single leaf is being rendered with precise exactitude.
One can see leaves that are just coming into their prime, one can see leaves that are just dying off.
[soft piano music evoking a contemplative mood]
And there is something intense about that study of nature, the study of the passing of time and how two simple plants can render, essentially, the meaning of life: the birth, the living and the death. There's everything there.
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