A self-portrait by Lucian Freud, made after a disagreement with a taxi driver left the artist with a black eye, is to be offered for sale for the first time at Sotheby’s next month. The life-size painting, made in the late Seventies, has never been exhibited or reproduced before, and is being treated by Sotheby’s as a major rediscovery.
Estimated at £3-4 million, it is being touted as “the artist’s most important self-depiction ever to appear at auction”, and will be the star lot in Sotheby’s contemporary art sale in London on February 10. According to anecdotal legend, Freud abandoned his taxi journey after the altercation and retreated to his studio where he began to paint his newly acquired feature.
In its catalogue, Sotheby’s suggests a noble pedigree for the work, illustrating it next to van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, and Francis Bacon’s Self-Portrait with Injured Eye. What is surprising is that there were not more black-eyed self-portraits by Freud.
“I used to have a lot of fights,” he has said. “It wasn’t because I like fighting, it was just that people said things to me which I felt the only reply was to hit them, and quite often I wanted to hit people.” Two versions of the painting are visible in the background of one of Freud’s best-known pictures, Two Irishmen in W11, a powerful image of an Irish bookmaker and his son, painted in Freud’s Holland Park studio in 1984-85. However, the bookies are not the sellers, says Sotheby’s, which is protecting the anonymity of its client, who is offering four other works by Freud in the same sale.
The value of the collection is estimated at £4.8-6.5 million. “We have known about the collection for some time,” says Cheyenne Westphal, of Sotheby’s. “There have not been any Freuds at auction for over a year, and we advised the owner that we feel the market is now ready for a group like this. Away from the auction room, we have heard of Freud paintings selling privately for £10 million and more in the last year.” When the self-portrait was painted, the record for a Freud was around £17,000. By 2008, it had risen to £17 million, reportedly paid for Benefits Supervisor Sleeping by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich. What is not known yet is the effect the recession may have had on demand for Freud, who is considered blue-chip, or whether the market will agree with Sotheby’s claims.
Christie’s star lot for the series is very different — a composition of sea sponges covered in gold leaf, known as a gold sponge relief, by Yves Klein, the enfant terrible of the art world in the Fifties and early Sixties, and valued at £5-7 million. Klein was born six years after Freud, in 1928, but died from a heart attack in 1962. During his short life he certainly did enough to make him arguably the most influential artist of the second half of the 20th century — a precursor of both the minimal and conceptual art movements.
While Freud’s figurative interests were very much planted on terra firma, Klein was more a child of the space age. Best known for his blue monochrome paintings with their intimations of infinite space, Klein also made reliefs, and body and fire paintings which emanated from performances. Always high on the contemporary art collector’s list, the record for Klein is £12 million, given by Christie’s owner, Francois Pinault, for a gold monochrome painting at Sotheby’s New York in May 2008. Christie’s is relying on the rarity of its sponge relief (only two were made in gold) and the inherent desirability of gold to attract collectors. Other Kleins at the sales include ANT 5, a female body outline and fire painting from a performance, priced at £1.5-2 million at Christie’s, and a huge fire-only painting, made with a blowtorch, priced from £2.5-3.5 million at Sotheby’s.
Gathering good quality works for these sales has, by all accounts, been easier than last year and, while estimates are still noticeably below boom levels for artists such as Andy Warhol and Richard Prince, total values are up. Together with Phillips de Pury & Co, which concentrates more on works by younger artists, the contemporary art sales week in London is estimated to bring at least £83 million, almost double the amount the same series made this time last year.