LUCIAN FREUD ETCHINGS WILL OPEN DEC. 16 AT NYC’S MOMA

AVV 11-26 #720515

NEW YORK CITY — The Museum of Modern Art will present “Lucian Freud: The Painter’s Etchings,” on view December 16–March 10 in the Special Exhibitions Gallery, third floor.

One of the foremost figurative artists working today, Lucian Freud (British, b Germany 1922) has redefined portraiture and the nude through his unblinking scrutiny of the human form. Although best known as a painter, etching has become integral to Freud’s practice.

In a dramatic and unusual cross-media installation, the exhibition will present the full scope of Freud’s achievements in etching along with a selection of related paintings and drawings, illuminating the crucial, cross-pollinating relationship between the two mediums.

More than 70 etchings will be shown, ranging from rare, early experiments from the 1940s to the increasingly large and complex compositions created since his rediscovery of the medium in the early 1980s, juxtaposed with some 23 paintings and 7 drawings.

Freud is not a traditional printmaker. He treats the etching plate like a canvas, standing the copper upright on an easel. He typically depicts the same sitters in etching as in painting, always working directly from his models and demarcating their forms through meticulous networks of finely etched lines. But with their figures dramatically cropped or isolated against empty backgrounds, Freud’s etchings achieve a new sense of psychological tension and formal abstraction.

The Museum of Modern Art is at 11 West 53rd Street. For information, www.moma.org or 212-708-9400.