In the Mold of the Fathers: Objects of Sculpture, Subjects of Legacy

The aim of this essay is to interrogate certain processes that I have followed in my sculpture, specifically how feelings about the responsibility of heritage have intersected with or become sublimated in problems of form. Looking back at my works from early childhood creations to recent portraiture, I recognize in what inspired many of them the faces and creations of my great-grandfather Sigmund Freud and my father Lucian Freud. Yet Sigmund died nearly twenty years before I was born in 1958, and for twenty-three years of my life—from age eight and a half to age thirty-one—I never saw my father, but encountered his image only through the media's lenses and his familiarity only through my paternal grandmother. This account of my work, therefore, explores the extent to which a fascination with specific visual, sculptural, and conceptual questions reflects a concern with a particular type of content—in this case, a concern with absent images, with persons experienced not always as living presences but always as legacies.

Perhaps a single question best articulates the problem of inheritance in my sculptures: Was it, I ask myself, all too much to be processed in the round? I have long occupied myself with purely formal and compositional devices, such as the circle, the omission of background, and the condensed relief. Did the loaded content—the dense, thick legacy—from my life provoke a two-sided, condensed form that only later, via the relief format, led to three-dimensional artwork, to an interest in portraiture in the round, and to a completion of the picture of the person and hence of the family? My need