Grief and its transcendence (Lost wax to lost fathers)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Wj-PnYYPk1ZSUx1sbLH9ZUU6SUQpazRX/view?usp=drive_link

‘Stalemate, a series of vinyl drawings, express the competitive dimension of Lucian Freud’s relationship with Francis Bacon. Jane quoted her father as saying that his friend had ‘gone off’, in other words gone ‘stale’. Bacon being Lucian’s mate but also his competitor, the two ranking as perhaps the most important figurative painters of the twentieth century.’

Jane replied: ‘In fact all my After Bacon sculptures appear in silhouette in Stalemate. Bacon was as much of an influence on my generation of art students including me, as was Lucian Freud. Bacon’s influence was easier to handle and process than my father’s influence. Of the two it is easier to talk about and admire the work of Bacon, as there is more distance.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26305128 p.357-358

Jane wrote: ‘Not only did it objectify in a clinical, biological way that we are each off-spring, but more particularly it evoked a memory of what my father Lucian said to me in the early 1990s about Francis Bacon, while Bacon was still alive. I asked him whether he admired Bacon’s work, and he replied: “Not now, as he has gone off!” He explained that Bacon, as an extrovert, could not keep it all going as he aged, and this destiny, he continued, would not apply to him, as he was an introvert. My father fell out with Bacon latterly, replacing him with another trusted colleague, the painter Frank Auerbach, of whose artwork he often spoke highly, but I think Lucian, before breaking ties with Bacon, regarded the older and more established figure of British art as an inspirational authority figure. After Bacon’s death, I could not help noticing that in the media Lucian Freud replaced Francis Bacon as "Britain's greatest living artist” but it was my father who, in 1991, told me that it was Bacon who encouraged him to see the whole picture, the image beyond the details, and to stand away from the work (by using longer brushes) and “make each brush stoke count.” In my sculpture I have sought to apply Bacon’s advice that I received as an indirect legacy from Lucian - every stoke, every molded clay pellet, must count within the compressed physical space of the chosen form - as in a series of 3D interpretations of gestural, emotive forms found in Bacon’s paintings, embodied in ‘After Bacon’, I have offered my own artistic meditation on my father’s words about his ‘father figure’

‘Relative Relations’ - Jane McAdam Freud p.5

Q: ‘The figure of the masturbating man is a striking opening to the exhibition. Freud wrote about cases in which masturbation was taboo. Does your treatment of the subject differ?’

Jane said: “Well nothing much has changed. Perhaps the small changes is that now sex is ranked behind death as our main taboo. I have certainly used the ‘taboo’ aspect of the subject to emphasise that we will be entering yet another taboo area - that is ‘therapy’ indeed the symbolic house of therapy. The hope is that, duly knocked off balance the viewer is woken up to experiencing the works.’

Q: ‘Would you say masturbation is a kind of ultimate relationship between a man and his penis?’

J: ‘Interesting question but another man could better answer that? These relationships are always relative and this piece is definitely open to interpretation. I was thinking more about masturbation as a metaphor for therapy, as in ‘spilling one’s guts’.’