A portrait Lucian Freud spent years insisting was not his will go on public display for the first time this summer after researchers uncovered evidence that appears to prove he painted it after all.
The work, Man in a Black Scarf, will be shown in “Benton End: A Paradise of Pollen and Paint” at London’s Garden Museum, according to The Guardian. Freud painted the portrait in 1939 while studying at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Hadleigh, Suffolk. The sitter is believed to be John Jameson, heir to the Jameson whiskey family.
The painting’s journey to a museum wall has taken nearly four decades.
In 1985, Christie’s cataloged the work as a Freud. Then Freud said it wasn’t, and the auction house changed its mind. He continued to deny the painting throughout his life.
Part of the dispute appears to have had less to do with paint and canvas than old grudges. According to Jon Lys Turner, who inherited the work, Freud had a falling out with Denis Wirth-Miller and Richard Chopping, fellow students at the Suffolk art school and the painting’s original owners. Turner has said Wirth-Miller gave him the portrait with instructions to authenticate and sell it “in order to infuriate Lucian.”
That proved easier said than done. For years, experts were reluctant to publicly contradict one of Britain’s most famous painters about his own work. The painting gained new attention in 2016 when it appeared on the BBC program Fake or Fortune?, where art historian Philip Mould concluded that it was probably genuine.
Two years later, Turner’s case got another boost. Researchers working in the Tate Britain archives found records kept by students at the East Anglian School showing what they had been painting each day. The records show Freud working on a portrait of John Jameson in 1939, exactly when Man in a Black Scarf is believed to have been painted.
The portrait will now go on view at an exhibition devoted to Benton End, the Suffolk farmhouse where artists Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines ran the East Anglian School. Turner has argued that the show also highlights Morris’s influence on Freud’s early work, pointing to similarities between Man in a Black Scarf and a portrait Freud painted of Morris around the same time.
The story gets at a surprisingly messy question. If an artist says a painting isn’t theirs, but the evidence says otherwise, who wins?
Freud was hardly the first artist to try to distance himself from part of his own history. According to a 2016 survey by Apollo, Pablo Picasso denied painting Erotic Scene (La Douceur) when shown a photograph of the work decades after it was made, calling it a “bad joke by friends.” Conservation work and archival research later convinced the Metropolitan Museum of Art that the painting was genuine, and it eventually went on view as part of a major Picasso exhibition.
Other artists have taken a different approach. Gerhard Richter has excluded some early paintings from his accepted body of work, effectively cutting them out of his official artistic record.
Cady Noland has repeatedly disavowed works she believed had been altered without her approval. In one case, after learning that parts of a sculpture had been replaced during a restoration, she informed its owner that the piece was “not an artwork,” helping spark a legal fight over a work that had sold for roughly $1.4 million.
Sometimes the artist turns out to be right. In 2016, a Chicago court sided with Peter Doig after a collector claimed the painter had created a landscape decades earlier. The work was ultimately attributed to another man entirely, backing Doig’s insistence that it was never his painting in the first place.
What makes the Freud case unusual is that the argument did not end when the artist died. Freud died in 2011 still denying that Man in a Black Scarf was his. Fifteen years later, the painting is heading into a museum anyway.
