Lucian Freud - Girl Holding Her Foot

Lucian Freud
Girl Holding Her Foot (1985)
Etching on Paper
72 x 89 cm
From the edition of 50
Signed & numbered in the lower margin

Although Lucian Freud is recognised more for his visceral paintings in
which he aims to make paint ‘work as flesh’, his drawings and etchings map
the body, revealing its nuances, sagging flesh, sinew, rises and hollows. His
figures have been described as naked rather than nude: naked in the sense
that they reveal more than flesh; they bare the figure’s soul. Freud’s
method of working from the centre to the edge of a drawing is an action of
‘drawing out’, of pulling, yanking, stretching the lines of the figure to its
utmost boundary, of ‘revealing’ not just displaying its nakedness. Freud’s
natural predilection for drawing led to etching as a process of capturing his
subject and reflects his earlier painstaking method of painting with small
sable brushes.
Freud created his first etchings in 1946, using a hotel-room sink as an acid
bath. However after several more experiments with the medium he felt
unsatisfied and abandoned it until the 1980s. In 1982 he made several
small prints of portrait heads for inclusion in a book.
This work is one of a number of prints created in 1985, whose large size
shows Freud’s interest in the possibilities of the medium, and his
confidence as a printmaker.
Girl Holding Her Foot is one of Freud’s first etched naked portraits, created
in 1985 when he began to work on much larger copper plates. In this work
we can see the artist’s enjoyment in experimenting with a larger plate,
using long parallel lines that curve gently over the sitter’s folded thighs,
combined with more dynamic and compulsive areas of dense hatching. The
artist often attempted to capture more than one expression from his sitters,
and the flickering of repetitive, intersecting lines across the girl's face gives
the impression of an almost imperceptible movement, just captured as her
hair slips from behind her ear and onto her sloping shoulder.
Despite the elegance of this etching, Girl Holding Her Foot remains an
intensely disorientating portrait. The sitter is suspended in the top half of
the plate, an expanse of empty space beneath her to which she is in no way
anchored. Freud’s lines curve and cluster around only the essential forms
of the sitter, hinting at the arm of a sofa but skirting away from any
commitment to a specific setting. In dispensing with any props or narrative,
Freud’s etching becomes not a public statement, but a private exchange
between the artist and sitter; an intimate and immediate portrait.