This is Girl in Bed by Lucien Freud, the painter who was also related to another big-daddy, one of the biggest big-daddies, Sigmund Freud.
Girl in Bed could be the name of my portrait today that no one is painting.
Lucien Freud is dead and he was very old and his paintings sold for a lot and so everyone is popping up on Facebook being all like "RIP Lucien Freud." Which I would do too until I thought about it and didn't want to. This happened last week or whatever when Cy Twombly died. Don't get me wrong. Cy Twombly and Lucien Freud are two of my favorite painters. But I had this great immense feeling about all of this that I needed to get out. There's something about the *meme* that annoys me, even though I too have participated in it.
Don't you think in a way these great big institutions are already dead? I think so. I don't know if I know exactly what I mean by this. I guess I mean - they are hung on great massive canvases in museums and sold for millions at Sotheby's and that is already kind of dead.
I love that story about Cy Twombly the woman who kissed one of his paintings. Her big red Chanel lips.
RIP - I feel this has already been painted there.
Okay. So this is what gets me the wrong way. Maybe. The painting above is called "Girl in Bed." The girl in the painting's name was Lady Caroline Blackwood, and she was also this wickedly funny novelist, but is best known for being a famous beauty and a muse and marrying Freud and then later Robert Lowell (Cal/Caligula/Caliban). Lowell who made a muse of her in "The Dolphin," she the golden-haired mermaid in the poems that also plagiarized from the phone calls and letters of his first wife he left for Caroline, Elizabeth Hardwick.
I do like Lucien Freud's women lying in bed - they all look like an advertisement for Paxil. I noticed that about the Munch's too when I was in Norway.
I don't really have a point. I always notice in encyclopedic museums they put the Lucien Freuds with the Francis Bacons, and then there's always like an anorexic Giacometti loitering about. The boy's club back again. That makes me think of Isabel Rawsthorne, who was the mistress to Giacometti and Bacon painted her too and even though he was queer had fucked her, or he would announce this at cocktail parties. Picasso painted her too.
Someone wrote at the opening of Rawsthorne's Wikipedia entry: "The life which became famous for its love affairs with extraordinary artists was governed by a love affair with art itself."
I've done most of my research for this book on Wikipedia. I'm kind of kidding.
I wanted to find out more about Rawsthorne but there's not much.
The women trapped in the paintings become ciphers.
She is dead too. The rest of them are long dead. And the painter still remains.
I think about all the Great Men that live these long, certain lives.
What is there to mourn? Who is there?
