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Lot Essay
June, 1938: a young Austrian photographer named Edmund Engelman treaded solemnly around the Vienna residence of Sigmund Freud, taking pictures of a remarkable setting soon to be divested of its owner. Several days later, Freud fled Vienna, traumatised by the Nazi’s annexing of Austria and fearing for his Jewish family’s safety, before seeking exile in Hampstead, London, for the last year of his life. Commissioned to photograph the mezzanine floor of Freud’s house on Berggasse 19, Engelman’s haunting photographs capture the coda of psychoanalysis’s most prominent room, home to consultations with patients such as Salvador Dalí, Gustav Mahler and Princess Marie Bonaparte. Engelman’s photography was to serve as both a room-plan for Freud once the psychoanalyst decorated his London apartment, and also as a commemoration to a lost time. Engelman’s photographs were published in 1976, and twenty years later this publication fell into the hands of American artist Robert Longo, who was gifted the book by a friend.
Bergasse 19 (published by Basic Books) was to provide Longo with the basis for The Freud Drawings, exhibited at Metro Pictures in 2001. Thirty large charcoal drawings were produced in immense faithfulness to the original photographs. In the present work, light slices across a vertical stretch of wall beneath a picture, which remains concealed by the melancholic darkness. An expert in producing chiaroscuro in his drawings, Engelman’s series provided Longo with a perfect field on which to experiment with monochromatic contrasts. Untitled (Picture Frame, Sitting Room, 1938) is perhaps the perfect example of The Freud Drawings to feature this accomplishment, with the conversation between light and dark conjuring a deafening silence of tension and anticipation. Longo was fixated on producing this series after pondering the atmosphere of Freud’s final days in Vienna. ‘What I was doing in the Freud Drawings’, Longo explained, ‘was a psychoanalysis of Freud’s apartment. The aspect that really shocked me was the awareness that this man, Freud, was sitting in this apartment, dealing with the deep and dark abysses of our souls, while the Nazis were running around outside, actually doing these dark things’ (R. Longo, quoted in M. Hentschel and K. A. Schroder, The Freud Drawings: Robert Longo, exh. cat., Krefelder Kunstmuseen, 2003, p. 6). Perfectly suited to its appropriation in charcoal, Untitled (Picture Frame, Sitting Room, 1938) decants a luminous, emotionally loaded memory into Longo’s rich and diverse oeuvre.
Bergasse 19 (published by Basic Books) was to provide Longo with the basis for The Freud Drawings, exhibited at Metro Pictures in 2001. Thirty large charcoal drawings were produced in immense faithfulness to the original photographs. In the present work, light slices across a vertical stretch of wall beneath a picture, which remains concealed by the melancholic darkness. An expert in producing chiaroscuro in his drawings, Engelman’s series provided Longo with a perfect field on which to experiment with monochromatic contrasts. Untitled (Picture Frame, Sitting Room, 1938) is perhaps the perfect example of The Freud Drawings to feature this accomplishment, with the conversation between light and dark conjuring a deafening silence of tension and anticipation. Longo was fixated on producing this series after pondering the atmosphere of Freud’s final days in Vienna. ‘What I was doing in the Freud Drawings’, Longo explained, ‘was a psychoanalysis of Freud’s apartment. The aspect that really shocked me was the awareness that this man, Freud, was sitting in this apartment, dealing with the deep and dark abysses of our souls, while the Nazis were running around outside, actually doing these dark things’ (R. Longo, quoted in M. Hentschel and K. A. Schroder, The Freud Drawings: Robert Longo, exh. cat., Krefelder Kunstmuseen, 2003, p. 6). Perfectly suited to its appropriation in charcoal, Untitled (Picture Frame, Sitting Room, 1938) decants a luminous, emotionally loaded memory into Longo’s rich and diverse oeuvre.