Buddha head by Jane McAdam Freud |
Freuds on the couch
Sculptor Jane McAdam Freud – the daughter of Lucian Freud – discovered the art collection of her great grandfather Sigmund inspired her own work.
JANE McAdam Freud only started using her famous family name when she was 33-years-old. The repercussions, she found, were immediate.
“I was given the Freedom of the City of London in 1991,” she says, from the office she occupies as the first artist-in-residence at the Freud Museum in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead.
“And as part of the ceremony I needed to find my birth certificate. My old one had been stolen after a burglary at my mother’s house. When I received my new certificate it had my full name on it for the first time – Jane McAdam Freud.”
Now 48, McAdam Freud, as she has been known ever since, a well-regarded sculptress, is the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, the granddaddy of modern psychoanalysis.
Her father is Sigmund’s grandson, Lucian Freud, one of our most renowned contemporary artists.
Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life in the house that is now a museum to his life and work. He fled to this country from Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1938.
McAdam Freud was known for much of her life simply as Jane McAdam, partly because her mercurial father – huge presence though he was – did not figure a great deal in her life. Her mother, Katharine McAdam, moved to Roehampton when she was eight, and raised her four – illegitimate – children independently.
Unsurprisingly, McAdam Freud’s childhood was characterised mainly, she says, by a deep feeling of anxiety. Adopting the name Freud, as she felt compelled to do after the 1991 ceremony, was the beginning of a long and sometimes painful journey into what she calls her real identity.
“For the first 20 years of my life, Freud was a taboo subject,” she says. “I remember my brother and I saying: what are we going to do with the old man? I spent many years abroad just immersed in my work, my sculptures.
“Using the name was freaky at first. I suddenly became someone else. There were all sorts of repercussions, some positive, some negative. I’d had reactions about being a McAdam – the Irish Catholic part of that.
“With the name Freud, I suddenly picked up on anti-semitism. And then lots of people would ask whether I was related to him. I found it very difficult at first. Then I gave into it and it was like coming home. It was painful but lovely.”
McAdam Freud’s coming home process – which has included the 18-month stint as artist-in-residence at the museum – has also culminated in a six-week exhibition at the museum which began yesterday (Wednesday).
Called Relative Relations, the concept manages to be simple but profound at the same time. Trawling through her great-grandfather’s eclectic collection of antiquities, which are housed in the museum, McAdam Freud began to find echoes of his collection in her own work.
It got her thinking about relationships, she says, all sorts – between herself and her great-grandfather, between viewers and art, between herself and her own work. The idea of pairing pieces from her work with Freud’s for an exhibition followed naturally.
“There are so many relationships which are being explored at the same time,” she explains. “Hence the title, Relative Relations. During the residency I realised I was looking at the relationships between his collected objects.
“He was quite eclectic – he just collected what he liked. But he had a sculptor’s sense of place. He was able to make several pairings between the artefacts himself. In a way it brought me closer to him.
“I was inspired by his placing of the objects and I wanted to place my objects next to him.”
The opportunity to work in the museum, she adds, was “heaven”. Bequeathed by Freud’s youngest daughter Anna in 1982 – herself a pioneer of child psychoanalysis – it has been lovingly maintained by the museum, to the extent that it is even possible to see the original couch used by Freud’s patients.
McAdam Freud is contributing five new pieces of work to the exhibition including a lifesize sculpture called one-plus-one – a fragmented body lying on its book that she calls a “metaphor for the therapeutic relationship”.
The project has not given her “closure” – though she does admit to a sense of being “at peace” now with her Freudian side. Mostly, she says, her life has been a journey, and a very lucky one at that.
“I don’t feel like a special Freudiana person although I am very proud of what he achieved,” she adds. “I don’t feel like I am part of some great legacy. I’m just trying to relate to others, like everyone else.”
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