Girl with Fig Leaf 1948

Lucian Freud made this etching, "Girl with Fig Leaf," at some point in his career of making figurative paintings and prints. The immediate art-historical association is, of course, the prudish gesture of covering nudity in classical sculpture. However, Freud's artistic project always resisted institutional refinement. In postwar Britain, artists struggled to reconcile the classical tradition with the modern need for unflinching realism. What, then, are we to make of this odd combination of exposure and concealment? Freud's visual vocabulary, learned in art school, always involved hard-won observations. Here he uses stark black ink to create high contrast. The plant looms large, as if wrested from a garden and pressed into service. By researching Freud's biography, we can understand how his childhood displacement from Nazi Germany impacted his later attitudes to the human form. The image reminds us that art is always situated in a context of political and personal history.