Naked Girl with Egg 1981

Curator: Well, that's confronting. And vulnerable. She looks exhausted, doesn’t she? Editor: Indeed. What we have here is Lucian Freud’s "Naked Girl with Egg," rendered in oil paint in 1981. A prime example of his unflinching gaze. Curator: Unflinching is putting it mildly! I mean, it’s brutal but beautifully so, somehow. It’s not romanticised, is it? It feels so real. That stark honesty… it's magnetic. What do you think about the scale? Editor: Scale is essential to understanding Freud. Consider how portraiture, historically, served as a display of wealth and status. Freud dispenses with that entirely. By enlarging the figure, and presenting her nude, he redirects the viewer's focus to the very materiality of the body itself. Stripped of artifice, she simply exists as pure form. Curator: Exactly. And that egg. It feels almost…biblical. Like an offering. Is she a sleeping Eve perhaps, dreaming of the serpent? What’s it all about do you think? Editor: That’s the intriguing bit isn’t it. There’s an almost clinical quality to the gaze; you could almost believe he sees his subjects not as people so much, as objects to be studied. But also there's the intimacy, perhaps uncomfortable, certainly voyeuristic. The setting is almost stage like with the drab backdrop really accentuating the curves of the subject. Curator: Voyeuristic is the word. It also feels very… him, very singular. I suppose that's why he and the School of London cut such striking figures amid other Modernist circles in painting at the time. No sentimentality, or at least if there is, it’s well hidden. And that fleshy rendering is also hard to look away from. Editor: Absolutely, he actively rejects the slickness and detachment often associated with modernism. This painting challenges those high modernist ideals. It engages directly with history and representation. So yes, singularity but equally a very public reckoning with image making as well. Curator: Well, I definitely have something new to think about after really sitting with that one. How about you? Editor: Yes, a potent reminder that the politics of the body never really goes away; this painting proves it can still evoke deep responses decades on.