Negar Azimi at the New Yorker:
In the room devoted to the archives of Lucian Freud in London’s National Portrait Gallery, a strikingly tender painting depicts a young woman with waifish features, blond tresses, and enormous slate-blue eyes. The portrait, “Girl in Bed,” has a delicacy that stands out amid the characteristically mottled, fleshy faces of Freud’s subjects—the slender fingers and crumpled duvet, the high blush on the cheeks. The girl in question is Caroline Blackwood, a twenty-one-year-old heiress of aristocratic extraction, who would soon become the artist’s wife. Freud made ten-odd paintings of Blackwood, charting the zigzag of their relationship, from the sensitive, alluring “Girl Reading” and “Girl in Bed” (both produced in 1952, at the height of their courtship), to the abject “Hotel Bedroom,” from 1954, in which Blackwood appears wizened and withdrawn, while Freud himself stands by the window, lost in shadow.
The artist was hardly alone in his fixation. Walker Evans photographed Blackwood more than a hundred times, capturing her progression from nymphlike youth to haggard middle age. Robert Lowell, her third and final husband, immortalized her in his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection “The Dolphin” as, variously, a dolphin, a baby killer whale, and a mermaid who dines on “her winded lovers’ bones.”
more here.
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