Arnold Zwicky's Blog

A quirky little follow-up to my 10/9/22 posting “Manspreading on a couch” — a set of crotch-focused paintings by Michael Carson, of men manspreading on couches — going further into the artistic subgenre of men in chairs, with three examples unearthed on Pinterest.

First, a reminder of the Carson oeuvre:

(#1)

Then Philip Oliver Hale’s remarkable Portrait of Thomas Joseph Edmund Adès (2002), in the National Portrait Gallery, London:

(#2)

On the subject, from the NPG site:

Adès [born 1971] is an internationally renowned composer, conductor and pianist. His works include the orchestral piece Asyla (1997) and the operas Powder Her Face (1995) and The Tempest (2004). His collaboration with video artist Tal Rosner In Seven Days premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in 2008. Adès’s piano performances of works by composers including Schumann and Beethoven have been critically acclaimed. He has conducted many orchestras and chamber ensembles including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Hallé Orchestra and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. He was Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival from 1999 to 2008.

The portrait is the result of a close collaboration between artist and sitter over a seven month period. The setting is an anonymous corner of Adès’ London home.

And then two Francis Bacon portraits:

(#3) Francis Bacon Seated Figure (1961: oil and sand on canvas)

(#4) Francis Bacon, Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach (1964)

From my 7/23/11 posting “Lucian Freud”, taking off from William Grimes in his NYT obit for Freud:

A decisive influence [on Lucian Freud] was Francis Bacon, a fellow artist at the 1954 Venice Biennale and the subject of one of his most famous works, a head painted in oil on copper in 1952. Bacon’s free, daring brushwork led Mr. Freud to abandon the linear, thinly painted portraits of the 1940s and move toward the brushy, searching portrait style of his mature work, with its severely muted palette of browns and yellows.

The Bacon portrait:

(#5)

I’ve alluded to Bacon in passing, because of the fictobiographical movie Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998), in which Daniel Craig plays Bacon’s lover, but now he figures in Freud’s story. Here’s one of Bacon’s (many) self-portraits:

(#6)

Both men led unorthodox lives, but at opposite ends of the sexuality scale. Freud was married (and divorced) twice — to Kitty Garman, daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, and to Lady Caroline Blackwood— but the real interest comes in trying to describe his survivors. As Grimes tells it, delicately:

He is survived by many children from his first marriage and from a series of romantic relationships.

(Presumably, somewhere someone is cataloguing these many children. And, by this time, grandchildren, if not great-grandchildren. Freud was 88 when he died, and he seems to have started horn-dogging early in his life.)

This entry was posted on January 28, 2023 at 4:18 am and is filed under Art, Gender and sexuality, Masculinity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.