Lucian Freud: A Self Portrait – Exhibition on Screen: Lucian Freud – A Self Portrait 2020 (2020)

Directed by: David Bickerstaff | 80 minutes | documentary

‘Lucian Freud: A Self Portrait’ (2020) is a documentary made on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Lucian Freud: The Self-portraits’ by The Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. More than 50 paintings, prints and drawings by Lucian Freud (1922-2011) have been brought together here for the first time, in which Freud portrayed himself or partly incorporated himself into someone else’s portrait.

This famous grandson of Sigmund Freud and modern master of British painting, like Rembrandt van Rijn, regularly turned the mirror on himself. His self-portraits show the artist in different phases of his life and, like Rembrandt, Freud did not shy away from mercilessly recording the aging process, even in increasingly thicker and coarser brushstrokes.

‘Lucian Freud: A Self Portrait’ comes from the stable of ‘Exhibition on screen’, a production company specializing in art documentaries made for exhibitions of major museums about famous artists such as Picasso and Van Gogh. Director David Bickerstaff is a regular within this series. For the past five years, he even delivered several films a year. That practice is reflected in this production. Bickerstaff provides the starting point of the exhibition with a biography of Freud and a treatise on the development of his work over time. A series of art experts and intimates of the exhibition provide the narrative. Lucian Freud himself speaks several times in fragments from the short film ‘Inside Job’ (2010) in which the well-known art historian John Richardson visits Lucian Freud in his studio.

It is Freud’s own words that provide the necessary taste, because ‘Lucian Freud — A Self Portrait’ is skillfully put together, but the whole still feels a bit limited. Bickerstaff started working with the material that was already available before the exhibition. A handful of the same paintings come up just too often and the experts limit themselves too much to the well-known encyclopaedic knowledge about Freud and his work. That is all part of the set-up of this otherwise fine documentary, but a little more in-depth would have been nice. The lack of critical footnotes also prevents a better understanding of Lucian Freud.