Stop, Look, Listen: Three things to do this week.

STOP.
English National Ballet at Tate Britain.

Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries plays host to the English National Ballet company for a week as part of the current 'Picasso and Modern British Art' exhibition. From 10.30-11.45am visitors can watch company classes and rehearsals, and on Friday night (6.30pm, 7.15pm, 8pm, 8.45pm) a premiere of three ballets inspired by Picasso's costume and set design for the Ballets Russes. See Tate website.

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LOOK.

Last chance to see 'Studio Life: Lucian Freud by David Dawson' at the Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Gallery on Bury Street. This exhibition shows photographs of Lucian Freud in his studio and at home, taken by his assistant, David Dawson, during the final years of his life.

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LISTEN.

Film at The Yard. 

From the 29th February to the 25th March, a new theatre created from reclaimed site materials in Hackney Wick will be showing various film screenings, including 'Reservoir Dogs', 'Breakfast at Tiffanys' and 'Requiem for a Dream'.  Tickets cost £9. Visit the-yard.co.uk to find out more.

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Artists and their Studios- in The Times Magazine today

An artist's studio is their only properly private space, keeping the depths of themselves a mystery to the outside work, until a work comes into the limelight and enters the public's domain. They can be fascinating spaces, accounting for years of unchecked creativity, and almost a work of art in their own right as they reveal so much about their owner. A new book, Sanctuary: Britain's Artists and Their Studios is to be released on the 12th March by Thames & Hudson, showing 120 of the country's artists in their workplaces. From Tracey Emin, to Grayson Perry and Lucian Freud, these photographs bring to light previously hidden and untouched interiors. 

A quote taken from Cecile Debray's, Lucian Freud: the studio, published on the occasion of the exhibition: ‘Lucian Freud: l’atelier’; “Freud works the walls in a double sense: over the thirty years or so of occupying his top flat studio at 36 Holland Park (1977-2009), he deposited dabs and smears of excess paint on available walls, gradually creating deeply textured surfaces of accumulated, hardened paste; during the same period, these paint walls returned to Freud’s canvases in the form of renderings of themselves- paint representing paint, often surrounded by similar paint that represents flesh”.

Scans my own, originally in The Times Magazine on 25.02.12

Stop, Look, Listen: Three things to do this week.

This week's 'Stop, Look, Listen' might be just a little Freud centred..

STOP.
Lucian Freud Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. 9th February- 27 May 2012

Grandson of Sigmund Freud and one of the country's most influential artists of his generation, Lucian Freud was renowned for his portraits, such as 'Benefits Supervisor Sleeping' and 'Naked Man with Back View'. He was also famous for his portrait of the Queen, which he refused to paint in any other style but his own, and the supermodel Kate Moss, who posed for him in 2002. This retrospective exhibition marks an opportunity for a review of his work after his death last year. 

LOOK. 

A Dangerous Method by David Cronenberg.

Starring Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender. Set at the beginning of the 20th Century, this film follows Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung's road to dispute in their respective Psychoanalytic theories.

LISTEN.

BBC Radio Four's Saturday Play.

Listen to Saturday's play again on iPlayer, or look forward to 'The Wolf Man' on the 18th February. 

Writer and playwright Deborah Levy has dramatised two of Freud's iconic case studies, 'Dora' and 'The Wolf Man'. 'Dora', set in 1899, finds a father imploring Sigmund Freud to treat his daughter after discovering her intention to end her life. 'The Wolf Man' focuses on 24 year old Sergei Pankejeff, a depressed son of a wealthy Russian landowner. 

RIP Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud in 1947 aged 25

'I paint people', Freud has said, 'not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be'. 

Lucian Freud, the foremost figurative artist in the 20th Century art world, renowned for his intense realist portraits depicting the vulnerability and humanity of his sitters, died last week at the age of 88. He was the grandson of psychoanalysist Sigmund Freud, born in Berlin in 1922 and moved to England with his Jewish Family in 1933, where he gained citizenship in 1939. Freud came to redefine British painting, with his stark portraiture showcasing what it is like to be human. Freud's subjects were often the people in his life; friends, family, fellow painters, lovers, children. As he has said 'The subject matter is autobiographical, it's all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement really'. His works have been increasingly sought after at recent auctions and his portrayal of an overweight nude woman, Sue Tilley, sleeping on a couch sold in 2008 for £20.6 million - a world record for a work by a living artist. He is also famous for his portrait of the Queen, which he refused to paint in any other style but his own, and the supermodel Kate Moss, who posed for him in 2002. 

Naked Man Back View 1992-1993

Reflection (Self Portrait) 1985

Portrait with Whippet

Benefits Supervisor Sleeping 1995

Nude with Leg Up 1992