Freud prints among major gift to gallery

Recently acquired artworks have gone on display, writes RUTH MILLINGTON

- RUTH MILLINGTON

Lucian Freud's Pluto, 1988 (etching with hand-colouring in ink on Somerset Satin White wove) © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2025 / Bridgeman Images. Below: Freud's 'Kai', 1991-92, etching. Photo: David Rowan

(The Lucian Freud Archive Bridgeman Images David Rowan)

LUCIAN Freud is best known for his raw and expressive figurative paintings. Working from life, he made portraits of those closest to him - friends, family, associates and lovers, as well as himself. Yet it’s the artist's black-and-white etchings that highlight human presence with even greater intensity.

Twenty-four of these prints have been acquired for The New Art Gallery Walsall’s Permanent Collection through the Cultural Gifts Scheme, administered by Arts Council England. This remarkable gift totals 80 items, including etchings by Frank Auerbach, Marc Balakjian, Stephen Conroy, Leon Kossoff, Celia Paul and Dorothea Wight, many of which are now on view in a major exhibition, Studio Prints: Celebrating the Balakjian Collection.

Displayed along one gallery wall are closely-cropped portraits by Freud, who has etched traces of life into the skin of sitters including ‘Kai’ (1991-2), who was the adult son of his muse, Suzy Boyt. Though not his father, Freud was very close to Kai, who seems at ease and lost in thought in the presence of the artist. With dense cross hatching, Freud has given a sculptural quality and depth to Kai’s face, the folds of his shirt and strong neck, where shadows fall.

At over life-size, this head is imposing, while each line appears as if under a magnifying lens.