[soft music evoking a contemplative mood]
Female Narrator Lucian Freud painted this portrait in 1947, early in his career. The sitter is his first wife, Kathleen Garman, nicknamed "Kitty." Director of the Getty, Timothy Potts.
Timothy Potts This is a work where, clearly, the subject matter, the way the woman holds the cat, almost as if she's strangling it ... that itself gives the image an incredible emotional tension. You can't help thinking there's something wrong with this situation.
[music ends]
He is, of all of the artists, the one most obsessed with figure painting. His work is all about understanding, both physically and psychologically, the sitter. He talks about how he would do portraits putting himself uncomfortably close to the sitter.
Female Narrator With his precise, detailed representation based on line, rather than mass or color, Freud here echoes northern Renaissance masters like Albrecht Dürer.
Timothy Potts He makes himself an absolute master of this, when it was, of course, deeply unfashionable to be representing the real world – but to be doing portraits in a meticulously detailed and representational and linear way, was doubly unfashionable at the time.
Female Narrator He achieved the smooth surface texture by using a finely–woven canvas... and the tiny details with the fine hairs of a sable brush.
[soft music evoking a contemplative mood]
Timothy Potts But he doesn't try to just capture the literal, physical reality of the sitter. I mean his work is anything but photographic. It's a sublime reality, which is sort of beyond ... Everything has an artistic meaning, and every line is beautifully calibrated to its role in the painting overall.
[music ends]
