Hotel Bedroom
Settling in Paris in 1952, Freud painted many portraits, including Hotel Bedroom (1954), which features a woman lying in a bed with white sheets pulled up to her shoulders. Her left hand rests on her cheek, and her gaze is fixed on a faraway place. In sharp contrast, a standing man is standing behind her and staring at her. His dark form looms over her menacingly, silhouetted against the sunlight. Other windows in the building across the street are visible in the background.
The man is Freud himself, and the woman is Lady Caroline Hamilton Temple Blackwood, the Guinness ale heiress with whom he eloped in 1952 after the divorce from his first wife. At the time they were staying at the Hotel La Louisiane, and the work reflects the anxiety and tension in their relationship, which had already begun to unravel. She would soon leave him, and the distraught Freud, while having many more relationships, would never marry again. This painting is among the works that Freud exhibited it at the Venice Biennale when he was invited to serve as the representative of Britain in 1954, a great honor. Like this and other early portraits by the artist, the work has a flat, drawing-like quality. Here, however, the body of the artist is a black hole, threatening to suck the light out of the rest of the picture. The artist's standing pose also seems to predict a turning point in his working method. This is the last portrait he completed while sitting down. From that point on, he chose to stand while painting. One of his more narrative works, it exemplifies the autobiographical self-absorption and detachment associated with his later work.
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